LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 

„ : . 

©{ptp. ' ©a|ujrigfit If a 

Shelf 



L + 



UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



THE 

Beasts of Ephesus 



BY 



REV. JAMES BRAND, D. D., 

Pastor First Congregational Church, 
OBERLIN, O. 



WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY 

REV. FRANCIS E. CLARK, D. D., 

President United Society of Christian Endeavor. 



If after the manner of men I fought with the beasts of Ephesus, 
what doth it profit me? If the dead are not raised, let us eat and drink, 
for to-morrow we die.— I Cor. XV: 32. 



1892 

THE ADVANCE PUBLISHING CO., 

Chicago. 



X 



Ulrfl 




®13 



copyright 1892 by 
The Advance Publishing Company. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS. 



I. Introductory 7 

II. The Young Christian and the City 17 

III. The Young Christian and Money 27 

IV. The Young Christian and Bad Books 38 

V. The Young Christian and the Theater 50 

VI. The Young Christian and the Card Table . . 71 

VII. The Young Christian and Clubs 81 

VIII. The Young Christian and the Popular Dance. 90 

IX. The Young Christian's Nights and Sundays. 105 
X. The Young Christian and the Sabbath 116 

XI. The Young Christian and Social Purity 131 

XII. The Young Christian and Market Infidelity. 144 

XIII. The Young Christian and the Majority 156 

XIV. The Young Christian and the Weed 166 

XV. Conclusion — Christ's Appeal to the Heroism 

of Young People 196 



INTRODUCTION. 

THIS is a book that the times demand. The 
Beasts of Ephesus are still going about 
seeking whom they may devour. They change 
their form but not their natures. Every young 
person has to battle with these as did Paul. 
This book will enable them to discern the 
ravenous beasts even under the sheep's cloth- 
ing and it will arm them for the fight with the 
panoply of God. 

This is a book from the right source. It is 
evidently wrought out of a pastor's loving 
heart. It is written by one who has seen with 
pain, and sometimes with anguish, the beasts 
rending their victims, by one who has longed 
to leap into the arena and slay the monsters that 
are slaying the young. Only a pastor who has 
mourned over mangled lives and wasted possi- 
bilities inyouth could have written such a book. 
There is in these chapters much of the "woe is 
me if" I write not this book. It is written not 
to satisfy a literary dilletanteism, but a yearn- 
ing love for young souls. 

This is a temperate book. It does not de- 
nounce amusements in a wholesale, indiscrim- 
inate way. It does not mistake a mouse for a 
lion, or brandish its sword against a harmless 



hare. It chooses real and not imaginary evils 
and makes nice discriminations between a sin 
per se and the tendency and trend of an amuse- 
ment which may lead to sin; basing its opposi- 
tion upon rational and reasonable grounds that 
will commend themselves to the experiences 
and consciences of young people everywhere. 

This is a strong book. In vigorous English 
the author grapples with many delicate subjects 
and never fails to make his meaning clear. The 
conventionalities of society life have not in- 
duced him to choose or pick phrases which are 
equivocal, or destitute of the fire of righteous 
indignation. The author sees underneath the 
surface the hideous, soul-blighting tendencies 
of some of these forms of social amusement, 
and strips off the mask which they wear in 
public. 

From personal experience I know that some 
of the questions here treated; the card table, 
the theater, the popular dance, etc., perplex 
many young Christians more than any other 
problems of the day. Dr. Brand's plain and 
earnest words will do much to resolve their 
doubts, will furnish them with weapons of of- 
fense and defense against the sophist, and will 
brace their souls to resist the attacks of the 
enemy of all righteousness. 

Above all, the author touches the right chord 
in appealing to the heroic element in Christian 
youths. Young people cannot be wheedled into 
the right, or coaxed into giving up the wrong, 



but he who writes' to them " because ye are 
strong," he who recognizes the Christlike cour- 
age of every true young Christian; he who ap- 
peals to the highest manliness and womanliness 
in the young disciple and urges duty " for 
Christ's sake" will not write in vain. With 
such spiritual insight and strength has Dr. 
Brand written these stirring chapters. I wish 
that every young person in all the land might 
read them. 

Francis E. Clark. 
Boston, May 24, 1892. 



CHAPTER I. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



PAUL is dead; but the Beasts of Ephesus are 
still alive. Their distinguishing character- 
istic is longevity. They belong to every age and 
clime. They will not cease to exist till the 
millennium comes. And every man and woman 
who proposes to be an out-and-out Chris- 
tian, must enter the arena, as Paul did, and 
give them battle. 

What were the Beasts of Ephesus? Beyond 
all reasonable doubt the Apostle's language in 
I Cor. xv : 32, was figurative, not literal. He 
meant that during his stay at Ephesus he had 
to contend with men and customs, ideas and 
influences, which were of such a nature that 
the battle was like that of a man fighting for 
life with wild beasts. This will seem to be the 
only reasonable interpretation when we re- 
member on the one hand, that Paul's Roman 
citizenship would have saved him from the indig- 
nity of being sentenced to literal combat with 

beasts in the am; hitheater; and on the other, if 

7 



8 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

it had been a literal fight the case would surely 
have been mentioned by Luke in his account 
of Paul's work in that city. It is incredible 
that such an event could have been passed over 
in silence by a careful historian who did men- 
tion details far less important than that would 
have been. 

Paul's thought was this: If, like the great 
mass of men, with no motive but that of the 
present earthly life, with no inspiration drawn 
from my relation to God and the hope of im- 
mortality, I have fought, as it were, with beasts 
here in Ephesus, what do I gain? What is the 
use? Why continue this struggle with the 
world, the flesh and the devil? If there is no 
immortal life beyond, then let us go with the 
world. 

That this is his thought seems the more cer- 
tain from the character of Ephesus itself. It 
was a city of " many adversaries," a great 
commercial center, lying at the junction of 
great roads which connected it with the inte- 
rior and far east, as the sea did with the far 
west. It naturally brought together all the 
moral leprosy of the heathen world. Canon 
Farrar calls it " The Vanity Fair of Asia." 
Paul was daily confronted in his work with 
the bitter prejudice of money-grasping Jews, 
and ridiculed by the luxurious and licentious 
Greeks, The city was famous for its intellect- 



INTRODUCTORY. 0, 

ual pride and its groveling superstition. It 
was honeycombed with sorcery and falsehood. 
The people lived for the attainment of crea- 
ture comforts and the gratification of carnal 
passions. The vicinity of the great temple, 
with its hordes of male and female priests, 
"reeked with the congregated pollution of 
Asia." Everywhere were wrong views of 
morals and false maxims of life. The city 
was full of men who would sell even spiritual 
gifts any hour for money with which to gratify 
the flesh. No self-denial, no lofty spiritual aims, 
blank materialism, social corruption, prostituted 
art. "Ionia, the corruptress of Greece, Ephesus 
the corruptress of Ionia, the favorite scene of 
her most voluptuous love tales; the lighted 
theater of her most ostentatious sins." Along 
with all this, and embosoming it all, was the 
perpetual presence of great, dazzling, alluring, 
captivating material splendor and display. 

In the midst of such scenes, that lonely man 
of God had to live and work and fight. Here 
were the Beasts of Ephesus. And yet in the 
strength of his simple, sublime faith, sustained 
by the presence of Christ and the assurance of 
immortality, he was enabled to stand his 
ground and daily fling himself anew into the un- 
ending combat. When I am tempted, he 
seems to say, as I often am, to fall in with the 
common life of this godless city, and take my 



10 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ease like other men, then I think of my mortal 
freedom; I think of the resurrection; I think 
of the throne of judgment; I think of eternal 
life; I think of communion with God; I re- 
member the life, the love, the peace, the glory 
of Christ, and the work of the Holy Spirit 
helping my infirmities; and my soul springs 
once more to the battle with eager, devouring 
joy. Thus we find both the nature of the 
Beasts and the secret of their defeat. The 
Beasts of Ephesus are in every sinner's heart 
and in every soul's environment. There is no 
escape from them but in victory, in city or 
country, at home or abroad. They are the 
spirits of "the world, the flesh and the devil." 
We thus have before us the general theme of 
the proposed series of articles. In these arti- 
cles the class of persons which I especially 
wish to address is made up for the most part 
of young CJiristians. For the last seventeen 
years I have been brought, in the providence 
of God, into peculiar relations to this class of 
people and have learned not only to watch with 
peculiar interest their spiritual growth, but al- 
so to love them with a peculiar intensity, and to 
set a measureless value upon the hope, the ener- 
gy, the generosity, the high aims and sublime 
possibilities of young men and young women 
just entered upon the Christian life. I shall not 
have to do with the vicious or dissipated, the 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 1 

prodigal or the courtesan, except indirectly. 
My present field is that of young church mem- 
bers. My motive is not simply to point out 
dangers, to utter warnings, or to keep Chris- 
tian life from deteriorating; but also, and 
chiefly, to help young Christians to plant their 
feet on higher and safer ground; to inquire in- 
to the causes of spiritual inefficiency, and lead 
my readers into the secret of heroic and joy- 
bringing service. I shall assume, therefore, 
that those whom I address are in sympathy 
with me and are ready to accept such sugges- 
tions and' arguments as may seem pertinent 
and reasonable. 

My task, therefore, is the delightful one of 
speaking to those who already appreciate the 
motives that moved and swayed the soul of 
Paul in his conflict with the Beasts of Ephesus. 
Let it be distinctly understood, then, that in 
traversing the ground of the proposed articles 
the principle advocated is not simply that of self- 
denial. The secret of Christian victory is not 
repression, but inspiration. We kill the devil by 
awakening the angel in the soul. We are not 
to fight the good fight all our days on the low 
line of the defensive. The heroic saints of 
God go out to victory and joy aggressively, 
along the line of positive virtue. They set out 
with the conviction that the world is not to be 
avoided, but conquered and subdued. With 



12 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

this fact in view, two things become absolutely 
necessary: 

I. A fixed spiritual purpose. Carlyle once 
asked an Edinburgh student what he was 
studying for. The young man said he had not 
made up his mind. "The man without a pur- 
pose," said Carlyle, "is like a ship without a 
rudder; a waif, a nothing, a no-man. Have a 
purpose in life, if it is only to kill and divide 
and sell oxen well. But have a purpose , and 
having it, throw such strength of mind and 
muscle into your work as God has given you." 
But Carlyle's rugged language falls short of 
the exquisite touch and force of that of the 
Apostle James, who says, "He that wavereth 
is like a surge of the sea, driven of the wind 
and tossed." Where can you find anything so 
absolutely the thing of circumstances as a wave 
of the sea? Its very existence is due to the 
wind. It rises or falls, is fierce or gentle, high 
or low, is rolled or tossed, in this direction or 
that, absolutely at the whim of the breeze, and 
when the wind ceases the wave is gone also. 
So is a man without a fixed spiritual purpose. 
If good influences surround him, he will be 
good or goodish. If evil influences come, he 
will be evil. If public opinion is favorable to 
religion, he will be religious; if adverse, he will 
be non-committal. If the Beasts of Ephesus 
are fierce and aggressive, he will decide that 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 3 

they are too strong to be overcome; if they are 
tame and gentle and winning, he will lie down 
with them in their den. 

On the other hand, a fixed spiritual purpose 
to go forth and conquer the world, within and 
without, for Christ, will make man the master 
of his circumstances. And one of the grandest 
facts of our nature is that, even in this world of 
low ideals and false maxims and models, every 
young Christian can, if he will, go like Paul 
into the noise and glare of a godless city, into 
the rush of trade, into the crowded street, into 
the great congregation where false lights flame 
and low standards and wrong principles pre- 
vail, and yet be alone with his own great pur- 
pose; alone with his sublime faith amid the 
faithless; alone with God amid the godless and 
the vile. 

2. Along with this fixed spiritual purpose 
every soul needs a settled Christian policy. The 
purpose answers the question, Shall I be a 
Christian at all? The settled policy decides 
what kind of a Christian I shall be. This policy 
should not beleft to be settled by circumstances 
as they arise, but should be settled, as far as 
possible, in advance. There are many ques- 
tions of casuistry, or morality, or expediency, 
some of them in the church and some between 
the church and the world, which every Chris- 
tian has to meet, and the settlement of which 



14 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

determines what kind of Christian one is going 
to be in the world. I do not urge a rash or 
hasty decision, but a wise and deliberate one, 
as to what attitude you will take toward certain 
questions which are in controversy, certain 
amusements, certain lines of business, certain 
phases of public sentiment and fashion, certain 
practices of society. Each one must settle these 
questions ultimately for himself. And he 
must do it in view of all the light he can get, 
as to their bearing on his own life, the life of 
his friends, the cause of Christ, and upon his 
own supreme spiritual purpose. Outside 
authority or restrictive rule cannot settle any 
but plain facts of revelation or self-evident 
truths. What each Christian needs is an in- 
telligent reason of his own for his chosen policy, 
formed in view of his fundamental purpose to 
live for the glory of God. It is on this account 
that we urge a settled Christian policy, that 
every Christian should, as far as possible, take 
up these practical questions of life and decide 
what attitude he will take regarding them, on 
principle, and in advance, before the soul's en- 
vironment takes final shape and crowds them 
upon him in the form of temptations. No 
Christian is in a proper condition to settle a 
doubtful question of casuistry or self-indul- 
gence after he is strongly tempted to follow a 
certain course. It is leaving these questions 



INTRODUCTORY. 1 5 

unsettled as to what attitude they will take, 
until they are forced upon the will for immediate 
action in the form of temptation, that gives the 
Beasts advantage and robs the church of its 
spiritual power. It can never be a matter of 
indifference what attitude we take toward the 
Beasts of Ephesus, which meet us at every 
turn. It is safe to say with Dr. Bushnell that, 
"It is not conformity we want. It is not being 
able to beat the world in its own way, but it is 
to stand apart, and above the world, and pro- 
duce the impression of a holy and separated 
life. This only can give us true Christian 
power." 

In conclusion, it may be said, that the utter 
inexperience of multitudes of young Chris- 
tians when they leave the home and go out 
into the world is reason enough why Christian 
ministers should not only hold but teach sound 
principles and rules with regard to the kind of 
beasts their tender flock may expect to meet. 
I cannot agree with the sentiment of an excel- 
lent friend who says that "everything is gained 
and nothing lost, by remanding to the back 
seat all discussion of amusements which are 
not sinful per se." Paul did not confine his 
instructions to practices which were sinful 
perse. He laid down great guiding Christian 
principles in addition to those of moral science, 
which will always be the safe guard of the church. 



l6 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

The question, What is sinful or righteous 
perse? is not the one which meets young 
Christians most frequently. The question of 
absolute right and wrong has become largely a 
matter of civil law in Christian nations. It is 
the question of what is best for the soul and 
best for the cause of Christ, which the Chris- 
tian stands for in the world. It is on these 
questions that the inexperienced Christian 
needs instruction. It would be foolish to say 
that a pastor should not speak of the danger- 
ous tendency of the modern theater because 
the act of attending the theater is not a sin 
per se. 

Many an unsuspecting soul has stumbled 
into limbo over this talk about "per se." It is 
the tendency of things not necessarily sinful 
per se that needs a clear light. Of course the 
great motives that gave Paul his victory — in- 
spiration rather than repression, "the expulsive 
power of a new affection" — will be the pastor's 
ground of appeal. But after all he is bound 
to send forth the young souls instructed as to 
the nature of the Beasts to be fought, as well 
as the secret of victory. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CITY. 

The relation of the city to Christian life and 
power is growing every day more important. 
The modern city of Christendom differs from 
the ancient pagan city in this: That in addi- 
tion to its innumerable perils to the spiritual 
life, it also has a few great advantages. While 
it presents the worst temptations, it also fur- 
nishes the greatest motives to self-denial and 
the grandest opportunities for service. It is 
the place where some of the best forces of 
our civilization gather; but also where the worst 
elements of wrecked humanity over-whelmingly 
concentrate. Aside from a small minority of 
Christian homes and a few Christian churches, 
standing like lonely beacon lights, illuminating 
a little space, it is by no means certain that the 
great modern city is much better than the 
ancient. New York, Cincinnati or Chicago is 
as truly a city of " many adversaries " as was 
ancient Ephesus; and the forces that antagon- 
ize the new life are probably not reduced. 

The chief fruits of Christianity thus far ap- 
pear in the individual, not in the city, as a whole. 
The church and the city are constantly acting 
and reacting upon each other, and the natural 

2 17 



15 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tendency is to find a common level. The re- 
sult is, Christianity is not always really Chris- 
tian. It is taking care of itself. Its attitude 
is not Apostolic. Its policy is timid, its pulse 
beats feebly and its voice is thin and low, as 
compared with the rampant roaring spirit of 
the city. There the fact of bad government, 
of low political standards, of party zeal at the 
expense of party virtue, and the selfish use of 
money especially prevail. 

Ex-President White of Cornell University 
says, "Without the slightest exaggeration, we 
may assert that with very few exceptions the 
city governments of the United States are the 
worst in Christendom; the most expensive, the 
most inefficient, the most corrupt." There the 
courts are corrupted and injustice is meted out 
by juries of saloon-keepers and thugs. There 
sensational and corrupting literature is espe- 
cially accessible to- the }/oung. There the new 
curse of the Sunday secular paper is thrust in 
every Christian's face. There the glaring ad- 
vertisements of vice, the obscene pictures of 
prostituted art meet the young Christian's eye 
unsought. There is the Sunday theater with 
its Satanic effrontery, reminding the Christian 
of his dishonored Christ and his lost Sabbath. 
There stands the brothel, luring men and 
women together to the portals of hell. There, 
as the cause and home of almost every other 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CITY. 10, 

vice, "the distinct and mighty school of self- 
indulgence," despiritualizing men's minds and 
breaking down all the bulwarks of moral recti- 
tude and self-control, stands the saloon, open 
day and night. And there, worst of all, the 
great busy, hurrying world of pleasure-seeking 
and gain-getting is acquiescing in the exist- 
ence of the saloon as it does in the existence 
of the church, and getting bravely accus- 
tomed to the woe and wickedness of the one, 
as it does to the high aims of the other. 
There, also, multitudes of well-to-do people 
who wear the Christian name, go cheerfully 
about their secular business in the presence of 
unspeakable want and misery, on the one hand, 
and measureless wealth and luxury on the 
other, as if all this were the arrangement of 
God! 

The peculiar sins of the great commercial 
centers of to-day are just as real as those of 
Ephesus or Rome. One might almost think 
the Apostle was describing in his apocalyptic 
vision, a modern Babylon, rather than the 
ancient, when he speaks of the "traffic in 
merchandise of gold and silver, and precious 
stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and purple, 
and silk, and scarlet, and all thyine wood, and 
every vessel of ivory and every vessel made of 
most precious wood, brass and iron and marble, 
and cinnamon, and spice, and incense and 



26 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ointment, and frankincense, and wine, and oil, 
and flour and wheat, and cattle, and sheep, 
and merchandise of horses and chariots, and 

slaves, AND THE SOULS OF MEN." 

Here, then, are the Beasts of the modern 
Ephesus, with which young disciples of 
Christ have to contend. And when we reflect 
that 290 out of every thousand of our popula- 
tion live in cities, great and small; that one in 
every five in this country live in cities of 50,- 
000 or upward; that in the last forty years the 
population of the fifty principal cities has in- 
creased six fold, while that of the whole coun- 
try has increased only three fold; that in every 
corner of the land the rush is toward a still 
greater congestion of population at such 
points; and therefore that vast numbers of 
young Christians just entering upon life either 
do or inevitably will spend their days in cities 
and have to meet such forces of evil — I say 
when we think of this, the question becomes 
imperious, "What is to be the type of the 
spiritual life of the future? What is to be the 
history of the church of God in America? 
What shall we do in the presence of these 
Beasts of Ephesus? Shall we fight or shall we 
surrender?" Our salvation and that of our 
country depends upon the answer. 

The influence of great cities is not confined 
to their own limits. It affects the religious 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CITY. 21 

faith and life of the State and Nation; nay, it 
reaches even to the ends of the earth. 

The result of this low state of spiritual life 
is painfully manifest. To a looker-on in most 
of our great cities, the first impression is that 
the churches are located where they are least 
needed, and that they are far too few for the 
population. In Boston there is one church to 
i, 600 people; in New York, one to 2,300; in St. 
Louis, one to 2,800; in Chicago, one to 2,300. 
In a single district of the latter city, says one 
of its own daily journals, there is a population 
of 50,000 with Sunday-school accommodations 
for 2,000. " It is full of theaters, saloons and 
gambling dens." " The churches," it is said, 
" don't care for that district. They are look- 
ing after the avenues "—what they seem to 
want is millions of money, not millions of men. 
In one section of New York City we are told 
there are 360,000 people, with one saloon to 
every 118 persons and one Protestant church 
to every 11,624 persons. 

Now the reason for this state of things is 
largely a social one. It cannot be denied that 
the spirit of the world has entered too much 
into the heart of the church, excluding from 
it the spirit of the Cross; blinding its eyes to 
the agony and despair of the " submerged 
tenth," deafening its ears to the Macedonian 
cry from the other part of the city, and tempt- 



22 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ing it to seek first the kingdom of creature 
comforts and the money to buy them. It is 
painfully evident that the vast multitude of 
churches are identified with the well-to-do and 
well-dressed portion of humanity and widely 
separated from the larger part of God's toiling 
poor. This has an ugly look. It does not 
suggest the Apostolic Church. It does not 
bring to mind the Christ. It does not suggest 
the Golden Rule. The very fact of the estab- 
lishment of so-called " people's churches " is 
an acknowledgement that some of the existing 
churches certainly have not been regarded as 
" people's churches." 

In saying these things, we do not forget that 
there are many noble efforts being made by the 
churches, many grand agencies employed, 
many consecrated souls at work for humanity 
in our great cities. There is the work of the 
city missionary societies, the agencies of the 
Woman's Christian Temperance Union, the 
children's aid societies, homes for newsboys, 
etc. All these show what Christianity can do, 
but how meager, how inadequate, compared 
with the measureless need of the past and the 
latent power of the churches. 

Now my appeal is to young Christians to 
rise up in their strength and convert all churches 
into "people's churches." I speak to young 
men, and to young women too, "because they 



are strong." What I would fain say to them, 
if they would listen, is that they must fight the 
Beasts of Ephesus not only outside, but in the 
Church of Christ. A new type of religion, 
with broader views of the meaning of the Cross, 
and a more Pauline consecration, must perme- 
ate the church, if the world is to be saved. 
There must be a more aggressive type of church 
life. We must start out with the conviction 
that we have joined not simply a divine Being 
but also a divine cause. To the young, the pro- 
gressive, the heroic, in the church of to-day, 
Christ himself makes this appeal. Nothing in 
Scripture is more touching than the Savior's 
sympathy and solicitude for Christians. Our 
solicitude for a man often ceases when we see 
him received into the church. Not so with 
Christ. Even when the shadow of the cross 
was falling upon his own life, his supreme 
thought and care was for the well-being, the 
efficiency of Christians, who were to be the 
light of the world, the saving element in soci- 
ety. "I am no more in the world; but these 
are in the world." I shall still work for the 
world but it must be henceforth through 
"these," and upon what kind of Christians they 
shall be will depend the kind of church the 
world is to have and so the destiny of the race. 
They are "in the world," and so tempted to 
live on the world's plane, to use the world's 



24 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tactics, to lose sight of their sublime mission, 
to turn a deaf ear to the pathetic, perpetual, 
inarticulate cry of the world's need. "These 
are in the world," and to be in it, to meet its 
pains and storms, its allurements, its curse and 
its falsehood, "Holy Father, keep them!' 

This is the Savior's solicitude to-day. 

Two things, therefore, I would ask young 
Christians to consider: First the vastness of the 
opportunity ; second, the grandeur of the motive. 
The city itself opens a door to every dweller 
therein for Christian service which cannot else- 
where be found. More can be done for Christ 
and humanity in a given time, and with smaller 
proportionate outlay of money, in the great 
city than anywhere else on the globe. Every- 
thing is within reach. There is the appeal of 
ignorance and suffering and want. There at the 
Christian's door is the hunger and thirst and 
temptation and pain and sadness and sin of our 
dilapidated humanity, lying in its moral misery 
under the face of God, struggling not for char- 
acter or culture or style, but for bare existence. 
And there, in the Christian's hands, are the 
glad tidings of great joy for all people, if they 
only have the heart to utter them. All lands 
are full to-day of great cities lifting up their 
cry for the good news. This was the "great 
and effectual door" which Paul found opened 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CITY. 25 

and which led him to devote his life to the 
great cities of the Roman Empire. 

The motive which Paul found not only suf- 
ficient, but over-mastering, was the fact of im- 
mortality, the infinite destiny of every man, the 
assurance of eternal life with God. From this 
fact spring all worthy conceptions of humanity. 
With the hope of immortality gone, the value 
of the soul ceases, and men are not worth liv- 
ing for. If there were nothing beyond this life 
of sin and suffering and tears, the motive for 
heroic self-mastery and service would be gone. 
If we believed that we were to die like the 
beasts, we should soon begin to live like the 
beasts. If a man is to die like a dog, why should 
he live like an angel? No; the inspiring motives 
which thrilled the souls of prophets and apostles 
are all included in Christ's conception of man, 
his moral freedom, his accountability, his im- 
mortality, his capacity to live with and be like 
God. We can thus see what Christ has done 
for the world. He has set on foot a divine up- 
ward movement in the life of humanity which 
is to touch and inspire every people under 
heaven. He has supplied us all with the infinite 
motives which impel to love-service and to 
victory. 

Oh, that young men and women of to-day, 
whose souls have been touched by the Spirit of 
God, might also be heart-smitten as Paul was 



26 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

with this great conquering motive! Oh, that 
they, when tempted to acquiesce in things as 
they are, when solicited to go with the crowd, 
to simply eat and drink and die, might catch 
the inspiration of immortality! Oh, that every 
reader might think of the throne of judgment 
and the glory of the self-denying Christ, and so 
fling himself into the battle! 



CHAPTER III. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 

I. Let no reader suppose that I am going 
to denounce the possession of wealth or the 
proper accumulation of the same. Would 
that we were all rich and all in the line of 
making more. Virtue does not consist in pov- 
erty, or in incapacity to accumulate. Neither 
does it consist in acquisitiveness. The strong 
Biblical attitude on this subject is simply 
against making acquisition of money a master 
passion. There is a difference between living 
to eat and eating to live. There is a whole 
hemisphere of difference between making 
money to live and living to make money; be- 
tween possessing wealth and letting wealth 
possess us. It is the latter which the Apostle 
says "pierces men through with many sorrows 
and drowns then in destruction and perdition," 
and the poor are just as really exposed to that 
method of " taking off " as the rich. 

Money, like brains, is not an evil, but a good. 
The danger, like that of fire, lies not in its use 
but in its abuse, and it is probable that no man 
ever makes a wrong use of his money till he 
has first made a wrong use of himself. Money 
is the tool of mind as really as is a crowbar or 

6l 



28 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

a fountain-pen. Mind ought not to be the tool 
of money. " Money is power," because it se- 
cures a great many things that all souls desire. 
Its relation to human desires, together with its 
abundance in this country, makes it a giant 
power for both good and evil in the hands of a 
half-Christianized civilization. Fifty billions 
of wealth in the nation; ten billions of it in 
the hands of evangelical Christians, and that 
increasing at the rate of six hundred thousand 
per day; increasing, that is, seventy-one times 
faster than our gifts to all home and foreign 
missions increase; that is a state of things 
which fires the imagination of old and young. 
For money is a power which not only gratifies 
but creates human desires. The desire of the 
saint for the promotion of God's kingdom, and 
of the worldling for the gratification of selfish- 
ness, are both stimulated by this servant alike 
of good and evil, who works for all without 
respect of persons. This is where the danger 
of money lies. It has always had this power 
in all ages, nations and climes. 

2. It is for this reason that Christ and the 
apostles uttered their warnings against the dan- 
ger of riches. Money affords the most subtle and 
universal temptation to which Christians are 
exposed. This is especially true in cities, 
where the various objects of desire are forced 
upon the attention in a way to inflame the lust of 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 2t) 

the eye and the pride of life. Who has not 
seen many a character which seemed to start 
out well in the Christian life, wilt and die, like 
a tender plant when a worm is at its root? 
Who has not seen Christians who could date 
their apostasy from Christ to a particular time 
when the money god bought their souls for 
some petty gratification of the flesh? "What 
multitudes of fresh, manly young fellows," says 
President Gates, "the high aspirations of home 
and college still radiant on their faces, we have 
seen each year sucked down into the outer cir- 
cles of the great whirlpools of speculation in 
our cities." What follies and crimes and con- 
sequent soul-wrecks we have all seen as the re- 
sult of this one passion. The false words, the 
frauds, the thefts, the defalcations, the mur- 
ders, the worse than murder of the opium 
traffic in poor China and the rum traffic 
in Darkest Africa, are all the horrid off- 
spring of this master passion for money, or 
what money will buy. The daily papers 
reek with the accounts of the collapses of 
character in the church and in the world 
among rich and poor alike, in business firms, 
and national political committees, where men 
have sold themselves for money. 

Among Christian young people who seldom, 
perhaps, go to the length of defalcation, the 
temptation takes the form of small self-indul- 



30 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

gences. The sin of getting and hoarding is 
less frequent among the young than the sin of 
waste and misappropriation. The cigar, the 
occasional glass of wine, the late supper, the 
questionable entertainment, the candy habit, 
all cost money which as Christians we owe to 
God. The result of these things is that when 
a call comes to help the cause of Christ we 
have nothing to give. We break our covenant 
with God to gratify the flesh. The heart learns 
to lust for display, elegance, luxury, competi- 
tion in style of dress. Money is the one thing 
that gratifies and at the same time stimulates 
and multiplies all of these desires. The power 
which money possesses tempts men to live be- 
yond their means; to keep up a scale of expend- 
iture requiring an income of three thousand 
dollars a year when the real income is only two 
thousand. Then follows the desperate struggle 
to make up the deficit: speculation, fraud, steal- 
ing, gambling, forgery, dishonest failures; to 
all of these methods does the self-indulgent 
soul resort. An English assignee in bankruptcy 
says he found that out of seventy-six cases, 
forty-nine bankrupts were ruined by simply liv- 
ing beyond their means. During the last few 
months a young man, a member of one of the 
New York churches, a worker in Sunday-school 
and Christian Endeavor Society, has fallen into 
this snare, and is now in the penitentiary. 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 3 1 

While in the tombs he wrote his pastor the 
story of his down-fall. He says, "In 1888, not- 
withstanding a good salary, I lived up my in- 
come and contracted some debts by easy living, 
at theater, in society and in the membership of 
organizations I ought not to have joined on 
account of financial inability to do so. Several 
creditors were pressing me continually, and 
having drawn ahead at the store, I did not 
know which way to turn. One day, Satan showed 
me the way out!' Then follows the account 
of a long series of deliberate frauds upon his 
employer, each of which he hoped to make 
right before it should be discovered, till he was 
involved to the amount of $5,000. As the cords 
tightened about him, he began to lie to his 
widowed mother. He took her plate and jewelry 
under pretense of putting them in safe deposit; 
and pawned them. Later he took her ring and 
watch and pawned them also. Last of all he forged 
his pastor's name to a check on the bank. At last 
he was detected, fled, was pursued, and for days 
was in such agony that he longed to be arrested, 
and at last he was. He was not a gambler, or 
a debauchee; but loved what money would 
secure and so lived beyond his means and 
"Satan showed him the way out." 

The dreadful thing about the love of money 
is that even when it never breaks out into open 
vice and public disgrace, it does lower the 



32 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

spiritual tone of the church and the community. 
It kills the spirit of self-denial, dries up the 
streams of benevolence, and so defeats the 
gospel of Christ. 

3. Now God's safeguard for his children 
against this danger is divinely simple and 
beautiful. It is not to flee from wealth or the 
accumulation of it but from its misappropri- 
ation. It is first to occupy the soul with God's 
thoughts; to steep the mind in Christ's view of 
life, Christ's estimate of money, Christ's con- 
ception of manhood and womanhood. This is 
always within the power of the will. Be a man 
of God. Be God's man in the set of your pur- 
pose, the determination of your will. Then 
Paul's words will apply, "Thou, O man of God, 
flee these things. Follow after righteousness, 
faith, love, patience, meekness. Fight the good 
fight of faith. Lay hold of eternal life where- 
unto ye are called." 

Second: Crucify the love of money by the 
love of Christ. Let the strong man who holds the 
palace be crowded out by the stronger than he. 
This, too, is within every Christian's power. 
That is, form at once the habit of systematic 
and large-hearted giving. Give your idol to 
Christ. Giving to self is the generic sin of 
mankind; giving to Christ is the generic virtue. 
The exercise of the one crucifies the other. 
There is no other way. Here we have God's 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 33 

sublime conception of life and salvation; that 
while we give to save the world, we ourselves 
are thereby saved from that danger which 
threatens to ruin both church and world at the 
same time. 

This giving does not imply that God dictates 
in detail just how, or when, or what proportion 
we shall give. He has left all that for us to 
settle in the light of the general principles of 
the new life. He has laid upon us as his chil- 
dren the supreme honor and responsibility of 
this free stewardship of all we have and all that 
we can honestly get. He wants to cultivate 
thoughtfulness and conscientiousness. He is 
building character; men, not mechanism. He 
might dictate to each one just what he should 
do, and how much he should give; but that 
would make not men but machines. He 
throws us lovingly upon our character, puts us 
to the crucial test and leaves us to decide. This 
is essential to our Christian probation. This 
does not slacken the cords of our responsi- 
bility, but tightens them. A Christian cannot 
say, "This matter of how much I should give 
to the cause of Christ is left unsettled by the 
Bible and therefore I may put it at a low figure." 
The reverse is the fact. The less specific God's 
precepts are, the greater is the Christian's re- 
sponsibility. A cashier in a bank to whose dis- 
cretion is committed the whole charge of the 



34 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

business, would be far more responsible than 
the clerk who simply follows specific rules 
So here, in the building of Christian character, 
too much revelation would be just as bad as too 
little. To stimulate and fortify the conscien- 
tious habit of giving, God keeps before us the 
mighty appeal of the world's need. He says, 
There is the field. There are the souls for 
whom I died. In proportion as you love me, 
decide in the court of your own soul what you 
ought to do with the money over which I have 
made you stewards. It is mine, not yours, but 
I want you to have the honor and benefit of its 
distribution. 

4. The wisdom and necessity of this method 
are clear when we reflect that, 

(1.) A true unselfish spirit of giving is fun- 
damental to Christian character. To become 
a giver rather than a receiver is a bottom prin- 
ciple of the gospel. It is the radical idea of 
the new life. There is nothing that lies so 
close to the very soul of the soul, or more 
deep down in the very elements of spiritual 
mindedness than the habitual exercise of giv- 
ing; prayer itself is not more fundamental to 
character. The amount we are able to give is 
of secondary importance. The great thing is to 
be radically in the spirit and process of giving 
to God. This is the highest test of conversion. 
There is probably no other absolute test of 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 35 

whether the dominion of selfishness is broken 
and the dominion of love established in the 
soul. Make the experiment purely for Christ's 
sake of giving away what you have been ac- 
customed to lavish on yourself, and you will 
find that nothing goes so straight to the center 
and soul of your being, either as a warning or 
as a joy, as that. 

(2.) This spirit of giving is the thing above 
all others that makes men like God. Bear in 
mind that the leading fact in the revelation of 
God is that he is a great giver. Almost all that 
we know of God is that he is an infinite giver. 
From this fact the apostle inferred his nature: 
" God is Love." " This is the highest concep- 
tion we can form of any being, that he should 
find a conscious blessedness in giving without 
limit and without exhaustion forevermore." 
And it is clear that one thing which makes a 
man like God is to become an unselfish giver. 
We talk about imitating Christ and walking in 
his likeness, and we can do neither till we be- 
come givers. We yearn for the joy of the 
Lord; but the infinitely holy joy of God lies in 
his giving. The divine likeness does not de- 
pend upon the amount of money or time or 
talent given, but the spirit. Without that, all 
so-called religion is a dry, dead, impudent 
parade. 

(3.) Thus only shall we escape what the 



36 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

apostle regards as underlying all other sins: 
the " love of money;" that love which makes 
gain rather than God the chief end of exist- 
ence. The moral discipline of giving is one 
of our supreme blessings. It is a refining and 
sanctifying force in the new life. To talk 
about being sanctified without this Godlike 
spirit is sheer delusion. " For they that will 
be rich fall into temptation and a snare and in- 
to many foolish and hurtful lusts, which drown 
men in destruction and perdition." 

To the Christian young woman then, let me 
say, the chief value of money to a woman is 
not in the clothes that it will buy. Are you 
from a home of wealth? Then you can afford 
to dress plainly and have an abundance to give 
to God's cause. You can set the much-needed 
example of plainness of dress in the house of 
God, which would do more toward winning 
back the love of the poor to the Church of 
Christ than anything else you can do. But if 
you have not wealth back of the elegance of 
your dress, you are either wronging a hard- 
working father or you are cheating yourself out 
of the blessing of giving liberally of your own 
earnings. How terrible it would be to hear, 
instead of those sweet words, "She hath done 
what she could," these: "She spent so much on 
herself that she could not do anything for me." 

To the Christian young man let me say this: If 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MONEY. 37 

financial ambition is growing upon you and 
tempting you to tricks of trade, strangle it, or 
it will strangle your soul. Live frugally. 
Make simplicity, economy, and self-denying 
love daily companions. Expend only as you 
have the means. Reckon only on what is 
actually yours. It is not well to count on some- 
thing miraculous turning up. You cannot live 
on air, much less on credit. Rest on your own 
hard money though it be but a penny. To 
borrow when you know you cannot pay is steal- 
ing. A tender conscience maybe an expensive 
luxury in these days, but when God's test of 
manhood is applied, it will be health to your 
countenance and marrow to your bones. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 

When occasionally we are startled by the fall 
of a Christian character, the blame is not all 
with the fallen. There are a thousand influences, 
which, though never exonerating the criminal, 
do facilitate and encourage the crime. The 
moral atmosphere; the habits and standards of 
society; the mad rush of everybody for wealth; 
the false theories of political economy; th * im- 
moral views of "cut-throat" competition and 
the survival of the fittest; the villianous custom 
of denouncing bad men in theory and voting 
for them in practice; knocking scoundrels down 
in the church and holding them up at the polls; 
all these are partakers of the crime through 
which the man fell. 

Among the malign influences which help 
young people downward, there is probab y 
none more subtle or powerful than that of bad 
literature. The influence of books, as such, 
upon human character, for both weal and woe, 
is probably the most potent force of these 
times. 

A recent writer tells us that, while visiting 
the State prison of Indiana, the chaplain of that 
institution informed him that out of 121 pris- 
oners then under his care, and who were con- 

38 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 39 

victed before they came of age, ninety-two 
attributed their crimes to the fact that their 
minds were corrupted and poisoned by reading 
the vile and false papers and books that are 
everywhere flooding the land to-day. 

'* Of all the things which man can do or 
make here below," says Carlyle, " by far the 
most momentous and wonderful and worthy, 
are the things we call books." " Books," says. 
Milton, "are not dead things, but do contain a 
potency of life in them to be as active as the 
soul was whose progeny they are; nay, they do 
preserve as in a vial the purest efficacy and ex 
traction of the living intellect that bred them." 
Oral address will always have its place and 
power, but it touches only thousands while the 
printed page reaches its tens of thousands. 
To-day books are practically omnipresent and 
omnipotent. They are cheap and overwhelm- 
ingly abundant; 25,000 new volumes are issued 
every year. Many of them are good, and how 
many of them are worse than worthless God 
only knows. At any rate they are read, and no 
friend of humanity can be indifferent to the in- 
fluence of that reading on the destiny of souls 
and the kingdom of God. It would be a de- 
lightful task to contemplate the influence of 
good books upon the human soul; but our 
present business is to look specially in the 
other direction. 



40 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

One of the Beasts of our modern Ephesus 
with which young Christians especially have 
to fight, nay, perhaps I might say a whole me- 
nagerie of them under a single name, is bad 
literature. The world is so full of books that, 
as Arthur Helps has said, " It is like standing 
in an orchard laden with fruit. It is not so 
much a matter of choice, as a matter of falling 
to and taking the best. The worm-eaten and 
wind-blasted and rotten will of course be passed 
by." But the trouble lies precisely there: the 
"worm-eaten and wind-blasted and rotten " are 
not passed by. They are the cheapest and most 
accessible, and hungry boys and girls do not 
stop to discriminate. It is to be feared that 
even parents are not sufficiently awake to the 
danger from this source. " Many are alive to 
the danger of bad associates, who are quite in- 
sensible to the danger of bad books." The 
fascination of bad books is more dangerous 
than that of bad men. Indeed, as Victor Hugo 
says, " The book is the man in his moral 
or immoral essence." It can be smuggled into 
the home and taken to a boy's room when its 
author would be shut out of doors. 

There are several classes and degrees of bad 
literature, looked at from the Christian point 
of view. 

First. The dignified and respectable atheis- 
tic or infidel books, written with great literary 






THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 41 

skill and power, and containing valuable in- 
formation, but written by men who despise 
God and hate religion. Gibbon's Rome and 
Hume's England are of this class. " Of the 
tens of thousands who have read Gibbon's His- 
tory of Rome for historical purposes," says ex- 
President Porter, " few have been able to es- 
cape the indirect influence which pervades it in 
every part, as the seeds of death will shake 
themselves from the gorgeous robe of damask 
and gold that has been worn by one smitten 
with the plague." Men of well-established 
Christian principles may consult such books 
with safety and profit; but not so the young 
Christian whose mind lies open to all the foul 
winds that blow. And, happily for our times, 
there is no need of going to such sources for 
historical information. 

There is a second class of books which may 
be called semi-religious. Professedly fair, but 
ethically false, they claim to have the religious 
interests of humanity at heart, and yet pander 
to unworthy motives by a subtle indirection. 
They are written by people who have dis- 
covered a weak spot in human nature, and pro- 
pose to make money and fame for themselves 
by its quack treatment. Like the Platonic 
philosophy, they teach one to seek, but not to 
find; to struggle, but not to rest. Their char- 
acteristic effect is fever. What do they con- 



42 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tain? A dream with a sad waking; a fling at 
quiet life to make the book smart; a sneer or 
two at simple, old-fashioned gospel religion, 
to make it sell. What is the result? The re- 
sult is like that of the little book mentioned in 
the tenth chapter of the Apocalypse. 

But the third class of bad reading is that 
composed of the openly and positively immoral 
books, and especially pictorial publications, 
with which every town is flooded; that class of 
low fiction which deals with the lives of pirates, 
thieves and foot pads, like Beadle's Dime 
Novels, the very titles and pictures of which 
are a curse to boys and girls. There are also 
numberless cheap illustrated papers and maga- 
zines like the "Police Gazette" which make no 
pretense to anything but a desire for money 
through appeals to the lowest and worst in 
humanity. They are simply made to sell, and 
they do sell. This is the food that thousands of 
boys are feeding upon, some of them members 
of the Church of Christ! And this is only a 
single degree worse than the love-sick twaddle, 
called fiction, of which thousands of girls are 
wasting both time and womanhood. 

In that remarkable book called "Letters from 
Hell," recommended by George Macdonald, a 
man is represented as writing warning letters 
to a friend, from the infernal pit. Speaking 
of books, he says, "Whatever is bad of course 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 43 

comes here to Hell. And so of printed matter, 
whatever is mortally evil or arrogantly stupid 
tends hitherward; the books arriving first, then 
the authors follow, and then the publishers come 
along with them. Polite literature has fur- 
nished us many books, very popular here, though 
often immodest. They are represented by two 
classes: the purely sensational and the sensa- 
tionally impure; the former being content to 
hint where the latter touch boldly; the one 
supremely worthless, the other wickedly in- 
genious." But it is little comfort that such 
books "go to their own place" after the mis- 
chief is done. 

Now the young Christian must understand 
that he cannot read or see such stuff, even out 
of curiosity, without destroying the enamel of 
his character. He will gradually lower the 
tone of his moral feelings, till at last the resist- 
ing power of the soul is gone; and when tempt- 
ation comes he will fall. Of course there is a 
type of literature of a still deeper depth of de- 
pravity than what I have alluded to, though 
it is doubtful if it can be any more destructive. 
That, however, as I am speaking to Christians, 
is not only not to be read, but " not to be once 
mentioned among you, as becometh saints." 
The result of reading such literature is, first, a 
waste of time; second, a destruction of the 
moral sense; third, pollution of the imagina- 



44 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tion; fourth, ruin of wholesome taste for good 
reading, and, fifth, a distaste for the Bible, which 
makes practical religion impossible. 

Now I shall not undertake in this article to 
recommend a list of books. My chief object 
now is to suggest a few simple principles. 

1. No sincere Christian can afford to spend 
time on a. frivolous book. It is no defense of a 
book to say, " It is harmless." The world is in 
such perishing need of strong, consecrated 
souls, and there are so many great themes de- 
manding attention and fitted to undergird the 
soul for high duty, that no being made in the 
image of God and redeemed by the blood of 
Christ has any right to read a book simply 
because it is harmless, or simply to please him- 
self, or to kill time. If one reads to kill time 
he will kill something more valuable than time. 
" It is as low and immoral to read as it is to 
eat, simply to please the palate." 

2. What should Christians do about reading 
infidel books? 

First, Keep them away from children and 
beginners in the new life. The physical system 
of a full-grown man may bear a degree of poi- 
son that would kill a child. The first time a 
child uses edged tools he cuts his fingers, but 
the day may come when he can use them to 
great advantage. 

Secondly, Discriminate among infidel books, 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 45 

There are moral and immoral unbelievers. 
There are men who write against Christianity 
because they hate it. They are prejudiced in 
mind and therefore illogical in argument. Such 
books are not fit to be read anywhere. But 
there are books written by honest doubters 
which may sometimes help a mature and candid 
Christian to see the weak points of his own 
faith and may help him to help his fellow men. 
No man should refuse to listen to a fair and 
candid presentation of all the objections to his 
own religion. But he should never read a work 
of an infidel without conscientiously reading at 
the same time the best defense of his own faith 
that he can find. Many a Christian innocently 
reads a skeptical book through and through 
because it is fresh, startling, and breezy, who 
never read a standard work on Christian evi- 
dence in his life and perhaps does not propose 
to. 

Thirdly, The Christian's motive in reading 
such books must be the better to honor God. 
No Christian can consistently read a book hos- 
tile to his faith from mere curiosity Indeed 
he cannot consistently read even a good book 
from mere curiosity, much less a book that 
strikes directly at Christ. If a child of God 
goes into a saloon or a brothel it must be to 
save somebody as Christ would do; to lift the 
fallen or expose the sin. That is a very ser- 



46 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ious business and the same principle applies 
in the matter ot reading boubtful books. 

3. What are we to do about devotio?ial read- 
ing? It is certainly not wise to neglect it. 
Our spiritual nature is quite as susceptible of 
improvement and inspiration from books as our 
intellectual. The most efficient Christians of 
every age owe much of their power to religious 
reading. If, as young Christians, we have no 
relish at first for devotional books, we are not 
to be discouraged. It can be cultivated. Be- 
sides, a true young Christian is not the person 
to be governed by silly likes or dislikes; but 
rather by his great spiritual needs. We need 
to keep in mind that the true aim of devo- 
tional reading is a double one; to secure strong 
convictions and deep, holy emotions. The 
former is the foundation of the latter. There- 
fore, when we sit down to read a religious book 
it is no child's play. It is to be done with no 
less seriousness and conscientiousness than the 
entering upon public worship or going into our 
closet to pray. 

4. What about Sunday reading in particu- 
lar? Whatever else the Christian may read, it 
is certain that he cannot afford to spend Sun- 
day reading on that latest device of the Devil 
to make money at the expense of Christian 
character: the Sunday secular paper. Apart 
from the work of Sabbath desecration in pub- 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 47 

lishing and distributing them, the worse influ- 
ence of Sunday papers is on the readers them- 
selves. It is not possible for any Christian 
family to form the habit of spending the Sab- 
bath hours over the average Sunday paper 
without spiritual deterioration. 

Here, for example, is the advertised list of 
attractions in an issue of the Sunday Cleveland 
Leader. The following list was advertised 
Saturday afternoon to create a demand for the 
Sunday issue: " In the serial story, Mrs. 
Stephens will relate the adventures of Dick 
Shelton and the outlaws; Edward Everett Hale 
will give the second of his talks on the tariff; 
Mrs. Wakeman will write about coffee planta- 
tions around Trinidad; Mrs. Sherwood has a 
charming article on summer life in the country; 
a number of experts will tell how to play ten- 
nis; Jennie June will give valuable hints to 
young women on dress making; Ed. Mott 
will give another story on hunting in which he 
relates the experience of an old panther-hunter 
who lived all his life in the woods." 

Now, aside from the impudent pretense of 
furnishing these papers to do the community 
good, a pretense which every intelligent person 
treats with contempt, it is plain that the weak 
point in Christian life lies just here, in Christian 
people buying, paying for, and sitting down to 
sully the hours of the Lord's day and debauch 



48 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

their spiritual life with such vapid and despir- 
itualizing stuff as the above. It is not strange 
that companies or corporations which have no 
religion and no God but mammon should try 
to add to their income by furnishing such Sun- 
day feasts. But that so many professed disci- 
ples of the Lord Jesus should fall into this 
Satanic trap with their eyes open, and should 
train their children in this mischievous form of 
Sabbath desecration, is a scandal to the whole 
Church of God. The religious life can no more 
endure it without decay than the body can en- 
dure the malaria of the valley of the Maumee. 

Sunday should neither be a day of mental 
drudgery nor mental dissipation. "Every read- 
er should make a business and conscience of 
having his Sunday reading intellectually strong 
as well as spiritually devout." Sunday should 
be a day for the girding up of the higher life 
for the conflicts and cares of the week. A 
Christian who does not find himself on Monday 
morning better fitted to meet the temptations 
to worldliness and meanness than he was be- 
fore, has probably abused God's gift of the 
Sabbath. 

In your reading don't feed simply on the 
publications of to-day. Get the wisdom of 
past ages which has stood the test of time. 
Don't read too many books. Hobbes once 
said, " If I read as many books as numbers of 



THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND BAD BOOKS. 49 

other do, I should be as ignorant as they." 
Have a high purpose in all of your reading. 
Select the history, the biography, the poetry, 
the novels that are true and strong and pure, 
the religious thoughts that will counteract the 
narrowing and crowding influence of your daily 
life. Cultivate the habit of reading aloud at 
home. 



CHAPTER V. 



THE THEATER. 



In discussing the subject of the theater, it is 
necessary to limit and define the theme. It is 
not the subject of amusements. It is not 
whether it is ever right or wise to patronize the 
theater, It is not the subject of the drama as a 
department of literature. It is quite essential 
to clear ideas here, to distinguish between the 
drama as a literature, and the theater as a place 
of dramatic representation. It is never incon- 
sistent to admire, profit by and praise the liter- 
ature of yfichylus and Sophocles, in that noblest 
period of the great men of Greece, and yet ab- 
hor and condemn the Grecian stage. Neither 
is it difficult to draw a line between the peer- 
less dramas of Shakespeare and the theater of 
to-day. What we are now concerned with is the 
theater. In the interest of brevity and clear- 
ness, it is necessary to limit still farther. Our 
theme is the influence of the theater upon morals 
and religion, as found in the history of the past and 
the observation of to-day '. 

It is a remarkable fact that the ponderous 
treatise on the drama of all ages and nations, 
found in the Encyclopedia Brittanica, does not 

50 



THE THEATER. 5 1 

touch the question of the influence of the the- 
ater upon moral character. The same may be 
said of the most of our books on the History 
of English Literature, though the winged and 
barbed words and disdainful style of Taine im- 
ply that from which virtue shrinks. The aim 
of such writers is to give the origin and devel- 
opment of the drama, and not to look at it, or 
the theater, from the moralist's point of view. 
We need, therefore, to go to philosophy and to 
general history for testimony on this point. 
The attitude which any one shall take in regard 
to the theater is not to be settled by law or by 
church authorities, or by art critics. It can only 
be settled by individuals, each one for himself, 
in view of facts and tendencies exhibited in 
history. It must also be understood here, that 
it is not an ideal theater, but the theater as it 
has been and is that we are to discuss. The 
ideal theater is an ideal idea. History can 
make no declaration in regard to what never 
existed. 

I. What then is the verdict of history as to 
the moral influence of the theater? Among an- 
cient Greek and Roman writers may be placed 
Plutarch, Xenophon, Plato, Socrates, Solon, 
Seneca, Tacitus, Ovid, and many others who 
have condemned the theater as hostile to pub- 
lic and private morals. " An English writer in 
the time of Charles the First," says Dr. Her- 



52 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

rick Johnson, " made a catalogue of authorities 
against the stage, which contains almost every 
name of eminence in the heathen and Christian 
world." Plutarch condemned it at Athens as 
demoralizing the people, getting their money, 
corrupting their youth; and when the stage 
censorship failed to improve the plays the the- 
ater was suppressed by law. The Lacedaemo- 
nians would not tolerate it in any form. Grote, 
referring to the corrupting influences of Aris- 
tophanes, says that Greek comedy was degrad- 
ing to the Athenian mind, and that Solon con- 
demned it in the sixth century, B. C., as " a 
vicious novelty tending to corrupt the integrity 
of human dealings." Plato says: " Plays raise 
the passions and pervert the use of them, and 
of consequence are dangerous to morality." 
Uhlhorn, speaking of the theater in the Roman 
Empire, says: 

" The adventures of deceived husbands, 
adulturies and amorous intrigues formed 
the staple of the plots. Virtue was made 
a mock of; the gods scoffed at, and every- 
thing worthy of veneration was dragged in 
the mire." Dr. Lord, in his " Old Roman 
World," takes the same ground. Philip Schaff 
says: 

" The Roman theater became more and more 
the nursery of vice and deserved to be abhorred 
by all men of decent feeling and refined taste." 



THE THEATER. 53 

*When Herod introduced the theater into Jeru- 
salem, Josephus (not a Christian) denounced 
it as corrupting the morals of the Jewish nation. 
It was not surprising, therefore, that when 
Christianity appeared, the earliest Christians 
and the church fathers presented a united front 
against the theater. 

Turning now to the "moral" and "miracle 
plays" of the Middle Ages, when Roman monks 
stupidly tried to utilize the stage in the 
interest of the church, it is evident that the at- 
tempt was a failure. The tendency of the crude 
plays was against morality, rather than in favor 
of religion. The inevitable drift became more 
and more toward secularism, and the church 
had to abandon the effort and withdraw. 
Lecky says that after the thirteenth century 
these plays assumed a more popular form, 
their religious character speedily declined, and 
they "became at last one of the most powerful 
agents in bringing the church, and indeed re- 

*Sometiiriea a pagan utters sentiments which Christian ministers 
would do well to teach. Julian, the Apostate, when striving to re-es- 
tablish Roman heathenism on the ruins of the Christian Church, stoie 
from Christianity the following, which he deemed necessary to even 
respectable and successful pagan religion: "The priest of the gods 
should never be seen in theaters or taverns. His conversation should 
l»e chaste, his diet temperate, his friends of honorable reputation; 
tndif he sometimes visits the Forum or the Palace, ho should appear 
only as the advocate of those who have vainly solicited either justice 
or mercy. His studies should be suited to the sanctity of his profes- 
sion. Licentious ta!es or comedies, orsatires must bebanished from 
hia library, which ought solely to consist of historical and philo- 
sophical writings; of history which is founded in truth, and of phil- 
osophy which is connected with religion. The impious opinion of 
epicureans and sceptics deserve his abhorrence and contempt." Gib- 
bon's Rome. Vol. II, p. 426, 



54 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ligion, into disrepute." The history of the 
early English theater is comparatively well 
understood. Some of the first dramatic writers 
of note, such as Greene and Marlowe, were 
utterly dissolute men. Of the former of these, 
Green, the historian, says: "He was a drunkard 
and a roysterer, with whom hell and the after 
world were butts of ceaseless mockery." Mar- 
lowe was a skeptic, and died "in a shameful 
brawl." 

Some of the first theaters of London were 
simply cock-pits, where the lowest class of so- 
ciety carried on their revolting sport of cock- 
fighting. One theater was actually called "The 
Cock-Pit," from which we still have the theatri- 
cal phrase, "The Pit." It is said than a young 
man once agreed to meet his friend at the door 
of the theater. In waiting a half hour for his 
friend, he was so impressed by the cries of the 
ushers, "This way to the pit! This way to the 
pit!" that, his Christian training getting the 
better of him, he concluded that he was on the 
brink of perdition and took to his heels. For a 
long time the theaters were attended only by 
men. The female parts of the drama were 
acted by young men and boys. No woman ap- 
peared on the stage until the time of the Res- 
toration. The first part ever acted by a woman 
was that of Shakespeare's " Desdemona." 
This innovation was at first regarded as shock- 



THE THEATER. 55 

ing and monstrous, even in that age, which 
Macaulay says, "were the days of servitude 
without loyalty, and sensuality without love; 
of dwarfish talents and gigantic vices; the para- 
dise of cold hearts and narrow minds; the 
golden age of the coward, the bigot and the 
slave." It is certain that the entrance of wo- 
man upon the stage did not purify it. Some of 
the worst features of the Italian comedy were 
put upon the boards in England at this period. 
Of course the Puritans of England all along- 
hated and fought the theater; and Mr. Green, 
the historian, says: "It was mainly the honest 
hatred of God-fearing men." Philip Sidney 
said, that by representing nothing but vice, the 
theater authorized the manners of debauched 
men and women. Macaulay tells us that "from 
the time the theaters were opened they became 
the seminaries of vice. Nothing charmed the 
depraved audience so much as to hear lines, 
grossly indecent, repeated by a beautiful girl 
supposed not yet to have lost her innocence." 
Sir Walter Scott, speaking of the theater of 
England and Scotland, even as late as his day, 
says; "It was abandoned to the vicious. The 
best portion of the house was set apart for 
abandoned characters." "The most refined 
theaters in the world," he says, "are destined to 
company so scandalous that persons not very 
nice in their taste of society must yet exclajm 



56 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

against the abuse." The charges against the 
theater in the city of London to-day are sub- 
stantially what they were in the days of Charles 
the Second. The same has been true in Amer- 
ica. Soon after the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, Congress passed a resolution recommend- 
ing to the several States the suppression of 
theatrical entertainments, as productive of 
"idleness, dissipation, and depravity of prin- 
ciples and manners." 

Of the theaters of to-day, probably no one 
will deny that the vast majority are debased 
and debasing. They are the plague spots of 
our civilization. And even the most respect- 
able and popular in our great cities, while they 
occasionally put upon the stage a clean 
drama to attract respectable people, are, for the 
most part, corrupt and corrupting. This is in- 
contestably proved by the testimony even of 
the secular press. In New York City within 
fifteen years, the Northern Monthly, The Round 
Table, The Nation, The Evening Post, The Tribune, 
have all given evidence against the best theaters 
of that city, which ought to subject them to 
eternal infamy. The Evening Post, speaking of 
public sentiment, says: 'There are many here 
who will welcome and enjoy a degree of licen- 
tiousness which would not be tolerated even in 
the English theater." The Tribune claims that 
Wallack's Theater 'Meads the van of the con- 



THE THEATER. 57 

temporary drama. When the season opens, a 
brilliant assemblage of character, mind, beauty 
and wit throngs its benches." "And this," says 
Dr. H. C. Haydn, "is what another paper says 
was put upon the boards at the opening night 
of Wallack's Theater for the entertainment of 
this brilliant assemblage. A deodorized French 
farce about the profligacy of married men and 
of some married women." There are certain 
plays acted there, which when first presented 
only men venture to witness. Then a few 
women go, blush and hang their heads, but in 
a few nights the whole is received with unveiled 
faces and "roars of laughter," by men and 
women alike. When a certain play, which I 
refuse to name, was brought on at Nibo's, says 
a secular paper, "very few men had the temerity 
to take women with them." The second even- 
ing, a small feminine element was present, but 
"before the second month city dames and care- 
fully reared damsels ventured to gaze on the 
wanton dance and lewd tableaux. Even the 
'demon dance' was soon received as a thing of 
course." "As a result," says the same paper, 
"the women have grown harder, ruder, less 
sensitive and modest." J. M. Buckley of New 
York, who made a candid study of no less than 
sixty plays, acted in the best theaters in that 
city, says: "If language which would not be 
tolerated among respectable people and would 



58 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

excite indignation if addressed to the most un- 
cultivated servant girl by an ordinary young 
man, and profaneness which would brand him 
who uttered it as irreligious areimproperamuse- 
merits, then at least fifty of these plays are to be 
condemned. Of the other ten, with three or 
four exceptions, those which are morally un- 
objectionable are of a comparatively low order 
of execution." Within a few years the shock- 
ing facts were brought to light that in the most 
of the theaters of the great cities, as in the time 
of Sir Walter Scott, portions of the building- 
were set apart for prostitutes and debauched 
men, and at one time in New York City such 
persons were admitted free; this last, however, 
is not true at the present time. A committee 
was once appointed to inquire into this feature 
of the case in the Royal Theater in London, 
and they reported that the theater could not be 
maintained if this class of persons were excluded. 
Dr. Haydn tells us that a similar committee 
reported in regard to Tremont Theater in 
Boston, that a part of the house was always 
frequented by this depraved class, and that it 
had always been so in every theater in Boston. 
A prominent theater in Philadelphia once ad- 
vertised, as a great attraction to fashionable 
people, a play which had actually been con- 
demned as too vile by the stage censors of 
Paris. I need not remind you that the terrible 



THE THEATER. 59 

exposure of the Chicago theaters made by Dr. 
Herrick Johnson, a few years ago, was based 
largely upon the testimony of the dramatic 
critics connected with the secular papers of 
that city. 

To any one who carefully examines the sub- 
ject, the conclusion cannot be escaped that 
while the theater has afforded some amuse- 
ment, some healthful, intellectual stimulus to a 
few, yet it has been like Gratiano's two grains 
of wheat in two bushels of chaff. History is 
against it, both as it has been and as it is. The 
best Christian sentiment of society at large has 
vastly improved, but the theater as a moral 
force is ?wt better than in the days of the Res- 
toration. I have recently sent out over eighty 
letters to prominent pastors in the chief cities 
of this country, asking among other things their 
judgment as to the effect of theater-going upon 
Christian life and usefulness. I have received 
between fifty and sixty replies. Six or eight 
of the writers take a negative position as to 
occasional attendance by Christians. Yet they 
say it is the exception and not the rule where 
theater-goers are active and spiritual minded. 
Two approve of the occasional attendance of 
Christians. All the rest believe in the expedi- 
ency of absolute total abstinence for all good peo- 
ple, as the theater now is. And every man 
from whom I have heard, thinks that habitual 



60 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

or indiscriminate theater-going is a curse. I 
have space only for a few selections from these 
letters. Dr. Gunsaulus, of Chicago, says: " The 
effect on the religious life, in most cases, is 
very weakening." Dr. Ingersoll, of Brooklyn: 
" One of the chief hindrances of efficient, con- 
secrated service on the part of young people in 
Brooklyn is the fascinating enticement of the 
theater, which, for the most part, bewilder the 
senses and benumb the conscience." Rev. 
Smith Baker, now of Minneapolis, after nine- 
teen years of work in Eastern cities, says: 
" The effect of theater-going was always to 
deaden their spiritual life and destroy their 
spiritual influence." Dr. Hawes, of Burlington, 
Vt.: " As a rule, theater-goers are not those 
on whom any pastor can depend when there is 
a call for special activity, or, indeed, in carry- 
ing forward the regular religious work of the 
church." Dr. Duryea, of Omaha, after speak- 
ing of the change of view of many Christians as 
to the propriety of attending the theater, says: 
" They fail, as I think, to consider the general 
influence of the theater as an institution, to the 
discredit of which, it must be said, that it does 
not keep the stage pure; is willing to pander to 
the pruriency and lust of the low and sensual, 
and has no true, deep respect for womanhood; 
no chivalric devotion to her purity and honor." 
Dr. Henry A. Stimson, of St. Louis: " My own 



THE THEATER. 6l 

conviction is that it is utterly destructive of 
spiritual life. The theater, if one may judge it 
by the sign-boards, is just now in the lowest 
stage of fleshliness and degradation." E. P. 
Goodwin, D. D., of Chicago, says: " I have 
half suspected sometimes, when popular plays 
were being presented, that one might count 
more church people there than they could at 
prayer meeting. The effect of theater-going is 
unquestionably bad. I believe that invariably 
it chills and hurts all Christian life. If any- 
thing may be called worldly, saturated through 
and through with a spirit that antagonizes the 
Spirit of Christ and his gospel, it is the theater. 
With us, all theaters, without exception, have 
Sunday performances; most of them an after- 
noon matinee as well as an evening entertain- 
ment. Furthermore, neither actors nor actresses 
seem to have any scruples as to traveling and 
performing on the Sabbath. Liquor saloons 
flank them on either side, and brothels and 
gambling dens are known to be within easy 
reach. After twenty or more years of pretty 
close observance of their influence, I do not hes- 
itate to say that it seems to me an impossibility 
to maintain a high Christian standard of either 
belief or life, and to develop a rounded, rich 
and potential Christian character, and at the 
same time to be a habitual or occasional attend- 
ant upon theaters. They are of the earth, 



62 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

earthy, and they who are seeking to lead a 
risen, heavenly life cannot come in contact 
with them without suffering defilement." Now 
it is a most remarkable circumstance that his- 
torians, moralists, philosophers and Christians 
through twenty-seven hundred years should 
have dreaded and testified against the theater 
as a moral influence on the race. 

II. Let us now look at the theater from an- 
other point of view. I hasten to remind you 
again that it is not the pure drama that is here 
under discussion, and that I do not hold that 
dramatic representation on the boards of the 
theater is necessarily evil. It may be freely 
conceded that if it could be separated from all 
moral taint, conducted by Christian men on 
Christian principles with a Christian motive, it 
might be a moral power for good. It has the 
elements of tremendous influence over the 
human mind. And Christians, above all others, 
would rejoice in its exercise if it were safe. 
But, conceding all this, the tendency has been 
uniformly bad. " Its claim to be a school of 
morals," says Dr. T. T. Munger, "is false, not 
because it is immoral, but because it cannot, 
from its own nature, be a teacher of morals." 

What is the matter? The matter is the mo- 
tive. The motive of the theater is money. The 
managers have absolutely no other. The means 
are adapted to the end. The scheme is to 



THE THEATER. 63 

make a sensation which will draw the crowd, 
which will bring the mo?iey. Hence the thea- 
ter's appeal to the sensibilities and passions is 
uniformly exaggerated and extreme. Not only 
do its plots consist of assassinations, poison- 
ings and illicit loves and intrigues, but every 
passion is overdrawn. "Anger is madness; 
ambition, frenzy; love, delirium." It does not 
hold the mirror up to Nature, except in her 
very worst aspects and her most degraded 
moods. Nature is not akvays after money. 
Nature is not always in an agony of either hor- 
ror or laughter. Nature is not always languish- 
ing with a great sorrow on her face and a bot- 
tle of laudanum in her pocket, weeping last tears 
over a false lover. Nature is not always nude, 
whirling around on one great loe, while the 
other is up in the air. Nature is not always 
armed with pistol and bowie knife. Nature is 
not always roaring through the streets with 
clenched fists, disheveled hair and blood-shot 
eye. She is not always cutting throats or play- 
ing the harlot. Nature never ridicules religion 
and morality for an entrance fee. Nature is 
sane, rational, decently clad, patient, self-con- 
tained, not living for cash, even divinely beau- 
tiful at times, like her Maker. Now, you can 
make money, but you cannot teach morals by 
simply exhibiting treachery and licentiousness. 
This is the trouble with the theater. Its choice 



64 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

of a theme, its scenic display, its acting a part, 
all have reference, so far as the management of 
the institution is concerned, to the ticket office 
at the door. 

Why, then, is the church so uniformly against 
the theater? Secular papers say it is religious 
bigotry. But the philosophers and historians of 
Greece and Rome during 600 years, B. C, were 
not Christian bigots. Plato was no religious 
crank. The Americans who signed the Decla- 
ration of Independence were not bigots. I will 
not say that there is no religious bigotry about 
this matter, but the blindest and narrowest big- 
otry in the case is that secularism which will not 
see that Christians must either keep themselves 
unspotted from the world, or cease to be Christ- 
ians. There is no earthly reason why Chris- 
tians and moralists should oppose the theater, 
except their dread of its influence as learned 
from experience; for Christians love a good 
time as well as other people. 

But why not reform the theater? That is a 
legitimate question. Why not? To reform the 
theater, you must reform four classes — the 
dramatist, the managers, the actors and the au- 
dience — no child's play. Reforms of the the- 
ater have been often tried and as often failed. 
Garrick tried it and failed. Hannah More tried 
it and failed. Macready tried it and failed. 
Henry Irving tried it and failed. Edwin Booth 



THE THEATER. 65 

tried it and failed. Governments, both ancient 
and modern, have tried it and failed. New 
England committees of high minded gentle- 
men, with every advantage on their side, tried 
it and failed, sixty years ago. Channing and 
Lyman Beecher tried it and failed. The hope 
of that sort of reform is a childish delusion. 
And yet, without doubt, Christians are bound 
to bring the gospel to bear upon the theater in 
some way. The question is, how? The most 
recent and popular method suggested in these 
days, is that of discrimination. Let the Chris- 
tian community generally go to the theater 
whenever a clean, standard drama is put upon 
the boards, and refuse to go at aH other times. 
This, it is claimed, would encourage the mana- 
gers to clean out their Augean stables and keep 
them cleaned. But there are several difficul- 
ties with this plan. Its success depends upon 
whether the managers can get larger incomes 
from Christian patronage as a whole, than from 
the world's patronage. Experience and statis- 
tics prove that while they bring out a clean 
play once in twenty times to draw the Chris- 
tian public, they can do better financially to 
cater to the world. The Christian and moral 
classes of people generally, do not care to go 
very much even to a pure theater, having, I sup- 
pose other and higher concerns on hand; so 
that the managers cannot afford to depend 

5 



66 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

upon tnem, and to slough off General Booth's 
" submerged tenth." And even if Christians 
were frequent attendants, they would not con- 
stitute in New York City more than one-tenth 
of the numerical patronage which the manage- 
ment would study to please. 

There is another difficulty here. The plan 
does not work in practice. The theater never 
had a larger per cent, of Christian attendance 
than to-day, and it was never more corrupt. 
This is poor encouragement for this method of 
reform. The reason is that Christian theater- 
goers are not there for the purpose of reform, 
but for enjoyment, or the study of art. But 
that is not the worst. The theater is an insti- 
tution supported by a board of managers, who 
propose to make money. Now suppose Chris- 
tians attend on the one clean night (if they 
have wit enough to find out beforehand which 
that is) and stay away the twenty dirty nights. 
What do they support? The institution. The 
same managers receive their support who run 
the machine the other twenty nights, seven 
nights in the week. Their money goes into the 
same till, and pays perhaps in part for the act- 
ing of the other twenty nights. Suppose our 
friend Hans Shellenbarger, who sells liquor in 
defiance of the law seven days in the week, and 
is known to be a corrupter of youth, should ad- 
vertise that one night in twenty he would clear 



THE THEATER. 6j 

away all signs of liquor and for three hours 
would sell nothing but Oxford Teachers' 
Bibles, would you feel it a privilege to go there 
for your books in order to reform the saloon? 
It is always a serious thing to support even in- 
directly an immoral institution, but that is not 
the worst. The influence of the stage on the 
Christian is as certain as that of the Christian 
upon the stage, and even more potent, and the 
tendency is toward a common level. That 
means death to Christian influence. 

What then? Shall we deny ourselves the 
theater? That would not be a stupendous loss. 
In the first place the theater is not essential to 
the enjoyment of dramatic literature. I admit 
with Vincent, that "the dramatic instinct is 
natural, but deny that the science accompani- 
ments of the theater are essential to the enjoy- 
ment of the dramatic gift." Let great actors 
become great readers, and the best results may 
still be secured. Again, the theater is not es- 
sential to rational entertainment. Strictly 
speaking, it is not an amusement which physi- 
ologist and moralist can approve. It lacks the 
essential element of amusement, that is, recre- 
ation. Its late hours, scenic allurements, and 
excessive appeals to the passions make it a 
dissipation rather than a recreation. A walk, 
a ride, a puli at the oar, an hour with the bat or 
football, or an evening with a friend over 



68 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

Hamlet or Macbeth, would be infinitely su- 
perior. Still further, the theater is not essential 
to high intellectual attainments, either in the 
art of eloquence or music. I know that ex- 
cellent people go to Paris and Berlin, and forth- 
with fall in with the theater and opera-going 
crowd in the interest, they think, of high art\ 
but fortunately, high art requires no such low 
vassalage. Mendelssohn, who was true, we are 
told, in a lying age, and in an adulterous age, 
was pure — speaking of a certain lewd operatic 
performance, said: "Yes all this produces an 
effect; but I have no music for such things. I 
consider it ignoble. Therefore, if the present 
epoch exalts this style, then I will write orato- 
rios." All hail! Mendelssohn! 

There are several points in regard to the 
theater which ought to help Christians and 
moralists to settle their relations to it: i. It 
has a power of fascination for the mind, the 
tendency of which is to make undue drafts 
upon attention and to over-stimulate the sensi- 
bilities and desires. 2. Its associations are 
such as to bring one into social contact with the 
worst elements of society. The theater is a 
great leveler. The churches and the slums had 
better be apart. 3. The best theaters of to-day 
are breaking down all reverence for the Chris- 
tian Sabbath, and it is very evident that in that 
respect they have already contaminated the 



THE THEATER. 69 

church. 4. Their method of advertising is a 
dishonor to our civilization, to say nothing of 
the Christian church. Only a short time ago 
the Cleveland Congregatioual Club, composed 
of laymen as well as ministers, felt called upon 
publicly to protest against the vile theatrical 
posters which were corrupting the children and 
youth of the city. Not a great while ago, the 
Cleveland Plai?i Dealer was out with an actually 
sane sentiment on this subject, urging the 
ministers to preach against this hideous, cor- 
rupting abomination of our time. Even the 
Plain Dealer! 5. The theater, to the frequent 
attendant, is excessively expensive. Herrick 
Johnson says: "The receipts of the New York 
theaters are greater than the expenses of the 
churches, the schools and the police force com- 
bined." 6. It is the testimony of experience 
and observation through the years, that, explain 
it as you will, theater-going deadens the spiritual 
life. 

Do I advise Christians to totally abstain from 
the theater? No. Not I. Advice is cheap and 
seldom followed. I only offer you the facts. 
For myself I believe in total abstinence. But 
each individual must decide and his decision 
must be his own. We are to decide of course, 
not as worldings, but as the children of God. 
Even the Bible does not settle this question for 
us. It gives us the great principles of the new 



70 THE BEASTS OF EPHESU3. 

life, and leaves us to decide in the court of our 
own souls upon their application. This per- 
sonal liberty is essential to the building of 
character. Too much revelation would be just 
as bad as too little. But we are bound to re- 
member that here lies both the glory and the 
peril of our probation. Every *good man is 
bound to keep himself in the best possible 
working trim for the promotion of righteous- 
ness. Hence I close with the words of Mazzini 
to the young men of Italy, in 1848: "Love and 
reverence the ideal. It is the country of the 
spirit — the city of the soul, in which all are 
brethren who believe in the inviolability of 
thought and the dignity of immortal natures. 
Love enthusiasm — the pure dream of the vir- 
gin soul, the lofty visions of early youth. 
Respect above all things your consciences. Have 
upon your lips the truth which God has placed 
in your hearts. While working in harmony, 
even with those who differ from you, yet ever 
bear erect your own banner, and promulgate 
your own faith." 



CHAPTER VI. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CARD-TABLE. 

Three thousand years ago it was said, 
" Surely in vain the net is spread in the sight 
of any bird." Yes, " surely," for the bird has 
such an instinct for self-preservation, that if 
the net is spread in its sight it will avoid it. 
But the same can hardly be said of a man. 
You may spread the net before his very eyes 
and show him a victim caught and struggling 
to be free, and yet so great is his confidence in 
his own power to get out of danger that, sooner 
or later, he will walk in and make the trial. To 
catch a bird, you must spread the net in secret; 
to catch a man you may spread it in open 
sight. This principle finds ample illustration 
in the hazards of games of chance. 

Let me say, however, to start with, that I do 
not speak of games of chance as necessarily 
wrong. What we are chiefly concerned with 
just now is not the moral nature of a certain 
act, but the tendency of a certain habit. If we 
speak of card-playing as one of the modern 
" Beasts of Ephesus," it is not because handling 
bits of painted pasteboard is essentially a sin, 
but because the habit is allied with certain 
associated evils; and this we believe can be 

71 



J2 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

made manifest to candid Christian minds. It 
must be remembered also that the persons now 
addressed are young Christians who have 
pledged themselves for life to live and work 
for the promotion of Christ's kingdom in the 
earth. Their master passion, therefore, is not 
simply to do all that statute law allows, or even 
all that to them is harmless in the line of amuse- 
ment, but to do that which is expedient for the 
great cause in which they are embarked. 

Granting, then, the abstract sinlessness of a 
game of cards, the question before us is simply 
one of expediency for a servant and child of 
God. The policy of the genuine Christian is 
not simply defensive but aggressive. His 
supreme end is not to indulge in all that may 
be escaped from without detriment, but to 
attain unto all that will render him more effi- 
cient in promoting the kingdom of Christ. 
Every moral act, therefore, whether of work or 
of play, must be questioned as to the tendency 
of its influence on the immortal nature, and its 
immediate influence on our spiritual efficiency 
as soldiers of Christ. An amusement which is 
not a recreation but a dissipation, which ex- 
hausts vital force and moral stamina instead of 
recruiting them, should be given a wide berth 
by Christians. With this understanding, I vent- 
ure to make the following mild and plain 
common-sense suggestions: 



THE CARD-TABLE. 73 

I. Experience has proved that games of 
chance have a peculiar fascination for most 
people, which tends strongly to induce a habit. 
This fact is based upon the natural craving of 
the human mind for excitement. That craving 
is not an evil in itself, but it is to be kept in 
subjection to reason and conscience. Now 
there is nothing to be found which so unnatur- 
ally feeds and stimulates this craving as the 
uncertainty and hazards of games of chance. 
It is probable that the illegal practice and pat- 
ronizing of lotteries, of which so many Ameri- 
cans have been guilty, are stimulated quite as 
much by the mere excitement of chance as by 
the hope of gain. Unquestionably, therefore, 
almost any game of chance, and especially 
cards, may be a natural stepping-stone to the 
sin of gambling. This same principle explains, 
in part, that modern abomination, the church 
lottery, which is a species of gambling in the 
name of religion. This vicious custom is 
practiced not to eke out the revenue of the 
State, like that gigantic swindle in Louisiana, 
but to pay the expenses of the church of 
Christ! It is done, we are told, with a good 
motive — done that the gospel may be preached, 
or that the poor widow and the orphan may be 
warmed and fed. But is the church to be sus- 
tained by blighting its spiritual life? Is the 
widow's boy to be ruined that the mother may 



74 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

get a ton of coal? Is the public law to be 
defied and the public conscience debauched in 
the name of religion? The whole scheme is 
an agreement with those who say, " Let us do 
evil that good may come," " whose damnation 
is just.'.' It is bad enough when Christians fail 
to sustain the cause of Christ and humanity by 
sheer neglect, but to turn the very house of 
God into a den of lottery thieves is yet a lower 
deep. If church officers, whether deacons or 
priests or bishops, when allowing such things 
should be put in the county jail for setting up a 
gambling establishment on their premises, as 
the law directs, it would be a great gain to the 
cause of righteousness. 

2. When the habit of card-playing is once 
formed, experience proves that it becomes so 
absorbing that it robs one of time and health 
and spiritual usefulness. It becomes a passion, 
a craze. Nights are spent in its indulgence. I 
know of a certain city church where the pre- 
vailing amusement of the members is " pro- 
gressive euchre," and the testimony of those 
who know is, that it is killing the spiritual life 
of the church. It acts as a blight upon the 
moral health of the young. It dissipates spir- 
itual impressions. It prevents the mind from 
coming into tender, sympathetic relations to 
the Savior, and thus defeats the very end for 
which the church exists. This is not because 



THE CARD-TABLE. 75 

handling pasteboard is a sin per se, but because 
the nature of the game unduly engrosses the 
mind of the child of God as it does that of the 
unsaved. 

3. The associations of the card-table are such 
in spite of all that worldly church members 
can say, that in the estimation of the world the 
Christian lowers himself by the use of it. The 
card-table like the common theater, is a terri- 
ble leveler. The reason is that cards are pecu- 
liarly, as Dr. Haydn has said, " the tools of 
the gambler. They are recognized as at home 
in the dens of vice and shame — in the hands of 
lewd men and women. It is beyond dispute 
that cards have ministered far more to vice and 
dissipation than to sweetness of temper, clean- 
ness of hands and purity of life." To quote 
the words of another, " The scoundrel in his 
lair, the scholar in his room, the pirate on his 
ship, the gay woman at parties, loafers at the 
street corners, public functionaries in their 
office, the beggar under the hedge, and some 
professors of religion in the somnolent hours 
of the Sabbath, waste their energies in the 
ruinous excitement of the game." Now it 
cannot be a mistake for Christians who are 
pledged to the service of God to avoid this 
leveling process. 

4. Card-playing leads many to gambling. 
It arms the temptation to gamble with almost 



?6 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

resistless power. I do not confound things 
sinful with things innocent. In loyalty to truth 
we are always bound to make distinctions. I 
believe in innocent amusement. I would con- 
scientiously encourage the innocent that I 
might condemn the sinful. When, therefore, 
I condemn social card-playing, it is not on the 
same ground on which I condemn gambling. I 
condemn gambling because it is a sin in itself. 
I condemn social card-playing because in so 
large a number of cases its tendency is to lead to 
the sin of gambling. You remember the words 
of the Lord Jesus: " If thy right hand offend 
thee, cut it off." Why? It was no sin to have 
a right hand, and to use it; but if W l offend 
thee, cut it off." " If thy right eye offend 
thee, pluck it out." Why? It was not wicked 
to have a right eye and to use it. No, but if it 
offend thee — if it cause thee to sin against thy 
soul or the soul of a friend — sacrifice it. You 
remember the words of Paul: "If meat make 
my brother to offend, I will eat no meat." It 
was not wrong in itself to eat meat, but if it 
even innocently led a brother to fall into sin, it 
was more expensive meat than Paul could 
afford to eat. There was nothing, not essential 
to his own spiritual life, that tended even re- 
motely to endanger another soul, which he 
would not give up. Let us plant ourselves on 
this Christian principle, and card-tables will 



THE CARD-TABLE. JJ 

disappear from the church of Christ. Let me 
speak on the matter to young ladies as well as 
young men. You young ladies are not perhaps 
absolutely, but you are relatively, stronger, 
morally, than young men, simply because the 
snares of the gambler are not laid for you. 
Being free from this temptation while young 
men are exposed, are you not thoughtless and 
cruel with regard to your influence? I have 
seen boys in school and young men in college 
and soldiers in camp debauched and ruined by 
gambling, who, if questioned would say, " I 
learned to be expert in the handling of cards 
in the social circle at home, and that prepared 
the way for my ruin." Have not you, Chris- 
tian young ladies, seen young men go from the 
innocent card-table where you sat with them to 
the gamblers' hell? Had your influence any- 
thing to do with their fate? Did you help 
them to learn that fatal trade? You do not 
know that you did. But I think you ought, as 
God's child, to k?iow that you did not. The 
Philadelphia Ledger a few years ago, had the 
following sensible remark: 

There are so many ways in which girls can 
be amusing, entertaining and useful to them- 
selves and to others, that it seems a great pity 
that any of them should resort to the common 
vices of coarse men. That they do so in the 
evening entertainments of private and elegant 
homes, and at the most fashionable summer 



?8 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

resorts, appears to be beyond question. And 
that the results will appear in unlooked-for de- 
moralization in the future of what we call good 
society may be set down as among the cer- 
tainties of natural law. 

I know that there are conscientious Christian 
parents who believe in training their children 
to handle cards at home as a safeguard against 
the temptation to gamble when away. But the 
experience of the Christian ages is largely 
against such a course. It could be easily 
shown that the boy who remains in total igno- 
rance of the use of cards is far less liable to be 
drawn into gambling than the boy who has be- 
come an expert in the use of them at home. I 
believe that wise Christian parents will almost 
instinctively sympathize with Dr. Haydn when 
he says: 

For that theory of education which favors 
training children in the temperate use of wine, 
the theater, the dance, the card-table and so 
on — however heroic this treatment may be 
deemed — we find it impossible to have more re- 
spect than for the practice which once pre- 
vailed, it is said, among Scythian mothers of 
throwing infant children into a running stream 
of cold water, that only the sturdy — those able 
to survive the test — might remain on their 
hands to be reared and educated. 

Burdette has said that if you dip your finger 
into a basin of water and then withdraw it, the 
hole which is left will be the measure of the in- 



THE CARD-TABLE. JQ 

fluence of good advice upon young men. This 
may do for a joke, and it may be true with 
many, but I do not believe it as to the children 
of God. I know there is a dark side to this 
subject. History and experience prove that 
advice is often fruitless. The drunkard and 
the gambler, in spite of all warnings, examples, 
facts, philosophies; in spite of the wail of misery 
that goes up from ten thousand broken hearts 
and ruined homes from generation to genera 
tion, go forward, treading heedlessly above the 
abysses till they sink into dishonored graves; 
and their children come marching on in the 
tracks of their fathers — another long phalanx 
with doom written upon their banners, to the 
same dishonored graves. But it is not all dark. 
I believe in the renewed hearts even of mis- 
guided and miseducated young men and young 
women. They are, they must be, open to the 
lessons of experience. Standing in the light 
of God's promise, that his word shall not return 
unto him void, and that he will help men to be 
wise for themselves, I speak to all whom it may 
concern and whose eye may fall upon these 
words, and call upon all who are tempted to rise 
and take the true Christian position. The aim 
of Christ is to break the dominion of all evil 
over the human mind, to set the soul free, to 
leave its grand powers untrammeled for the 
lofty attainments of philanthropy and eternal 



80 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

life. We not only may, but we must, ally our- 
selves to him, if personal wreck is to be escaped. 
The cause of morality, the cause of liberty, 
need — oh, how much they need — the best, the 
highest, the purest manhood that we can fur- 
nish. Humanity, country, the church, our own 
immortality, all call upon us to take a position 
now in the service of Christ that we shall not 
have to repent of when we stand at the judg- 
ment bar. 



CHAPTER VII. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE CLUB. 

I. The Christian home is the most important 
spot on this globe. The characteristic differ- 
rence between civilized and savage life lies in 
the Christian home. In one of the great crises 
of human history, when Egypt was shrouded 
in darkness, so that they "saw not one another, 
neither rose up any from his place, the children 
of Israel had light in their dwellings." The 
characteristic feature of heathenism is the ab- 
sence of any true conception of home. They 
sit near each other in the bonds of heredity, in 
the terrible power of social influence, but 
spiritually they do not see each other, "neither 
can any rise up from his place." Egypt, with 
all her civilization and all her hoary institutions, 
had no blessing for humanity. The hope of the 
race lay simply in those God-lighted homes of 
Goshen. A great truth was reached when it 
was made plain that God meant to use the 
family, the home, as an instrument to build up 
redeemed society. It is the light of the Chris- 
tian home to which we must look chiefly for 
the progress of the race. 

A civilized state cannot survive without it. 
The communism and nihilism which infest our 
institutions and endanger our national life must 

6 81 



82 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS, 

find their antidote, if anywhere, in the Christian 
home. If the multiplication of such homes 
does not keep pace with the growth of popula- 
tion, society must deteriorate and the state 
must fall. 

II. The Christian church is second in im- 
portance only to the Christian home. The 
institutions which have become sacred and 
essential to Americans are the home, the 
church, the school, and the free government 
by ballot. These constitute the cordon of de- 
fenses which guard the liberty and ennoble the 
life of the American people. The school-house 
and the hall of legislation are both the children 
of the church. The relation which the church 
sustains to the economics, to the social ethics, 
to the intellectual life and the spiritual destiny 
of the nation is such that its removal would 
remand us to paganism. Anything, therefore, 
which touches injuriously the home and the 
church, touches the eye and the soul of the 
nation, and throws itself across the path of the 
kingdom of God. 

Now it is on this account that I am jealous 
of clubs. I believe that the vast growth of 
" club life " in our generation is a menace to 
both home and church. Let no devotee of 
clubs, however, imagine that I am going to 
make an indiscriminate onslaught upon his 
favorite institution. I believe " a good club is 



THE CLUB. 83 

a good thing and a bad one is not." I am well 
aware that there are all sorts. The bad, how- 
ever, are very numerous, and are growing more 
so. There is also an increasing rage for club 
life generally, which has become epidemic 
among men and even among some women. 
The clubs most to be feared are those which 
are organized chiefly for social purposes, which 
are confined to men, which become more 
attractive to husbands and sons than their 
homes and so compete with home attractions, 
which are more expensive even for lunching 
purposes than the best hotels, which cost from 
one to three hundred dollars for initiation fees, 
and another hundred, more or less, for annual 
dues, which are known as drinking places to be 
quite as dangerous as the saloon, and which 
are open Sundays and thus compete with 
church as well as home attractions. If there 
are no such places for respectable men, let 
some one arise and convict me. That the 
attractions of the club-house are not a myth is 
pretty clear from the fact that many men 
belong to a number of clubs at the same time. 
A "respectable" gentleman, and son of a most 
worthy Christian man, died in New York not 
long ago, and although having had a fair in- 
come, he left his wife and young family in want. 
He was at the time of his death a member of 
ten clubs. 



84 fHfi BEASTS OF £PH£SUS. 

Now many things might be said about such 
clubs as to their waste of money, their tempta- 
tion to drink, but my principal point is that the 
passion for such organizations betrays a danger- 
ous sign of our times, because it threatens 
both the church and the home. It is certain 
that Christian young men had better give them 
a wide berth. If there is any danger threaten- 
ing American society it is the slight attach- 
ment of many men, young and old, to their 
homes. Few people are aware how society in 
cities, both here and in England, is honey- 
combed with clubs, and it would be difficult to 
find in either country to-day a thoroughly 
earnest Christian worker who is not opposed to 
them. "Usually," says one of our ablest maga- 
zines, "the club rooms are open on the Sabbath, 
often evading the law against Sunday saloons, 
alluring young men from the services of the 
church and of the Y. M. C. A. alike. On that 
one home day i and on all other days, they draw 
the father and son and brother from the refining ( 
fellowship of the home to coarser companion- 
ship and conversation." 

The pastors of our churches are as a rule 
awake to the danger of the club. One of them 
writes me: "Our churches would not be so 
destitute of men if it were not for the allure- 
ments of the club house." Dr. Gunsaulus says, 
"Theymost radically interfere with the higher 



THE CLUB. 85 

ideals of happiness at home." Dr. Goodwin says, 
"My opinion about clubs is that they draw men 
away from their families, offer temptation in 
the way of card-playing, wine and liquor-drink- 
ing, and are among the most subtle and damag- 
ing foes of both the home and the church." A 
New England pastor says, "Clubs are of all 
sorts, good, bad, indifferent. The best thing 
that can be said about most of them is that they 
are not very bad. They are for the most part 
mere loafing places, dreary enough for the man 
who has a purpose in life. Of course they de- 
spoil the home. I married a couple recently, 
and was exhorted to arrive at half-past-six, 
sharp, as the groom must go to his lodge at 
seven!" Among others who have expressed 
positive views on the subject of clubs, one should 
not forget to read from Thackeray's "Book of 
Snobs," the chapters on "Club Snobs." 

But to speak a little more fully of the home: 
what is the position which a man occupies in 
the home, as father, son, and brother? Does 
he merely furnish the financial basis, and are 
the mother and sister responsible for every- 
thing else that makes the home different from 
a hotel? Does not the father's time belong to 
the home out of his business hours just as 
much as the mother's after the housework is 
done? 

It is not the money furnished by the father's 



86 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

toil, nor the manual labor of housekeeping 
that makes the home. It is the amount of heart 
put into the home by both father and mother. 
The man and the woman who do not want a 
real heart-home, have no business to marry. 
Their interest after marriage is one. Is con- 
genial society what they want? Let them 
gather such society to themselves in their home. 
Let there be a revival of the old-fashioned 
grace of hospitality. The forms and cere- 
monies of hospitality have almost killed the 
soul of it. But let us cultivate an independent 
indifference to the laborious requirements of 
fashionable society and simply have our friends 
with us when we choose, without fuss and for- 
mality. And " our friends " means not merely 
those of the father and mother, but of the 
young folks and children as well. This finding 
one's society away from home is ruinous to the 
atmosphere of the home as a center of culture, 
which is what it should be. There is no more 
civilizing influence to children than the having 
of earnest, Christian, cultivated people as fre- 
quent guests. As things are now, the city 
gentleman too often takes his visiting friend to 
his club. Now if his friend is a man of worth 
he inflicts a real loss on his home by not shar- 
ing the social pleasure with his dear ones there. 
All the selfish gratifications, all the luxury, all 
the congenial company of fellow members of 



THE CLUfe. 87 

the club will never compensate the father for 
the losses that will come to his home by means 
of his absence. His boys are growing daily 
like their associates. They will not stay at 
home if he does not. He might in the evening 
and Sabbath hours be moulding them into the 
men that he wishes them to be. The simple 
fact that the father and mother love to be at 
home, whenever it is possible, is an anchor to 
the whole family that will hold many a child 
from drifting out into the current of sin. 

Here is what one woman says about it: " It 
is just as heathenish for a father to withdraw 
into the luxury of his club when his wife is 
wearing herself out with the little ones at 
home, as is the Mormon father's brutal habit of 
courting a new wife when the woman he first 
married comes to have her hands tied with the 
care of children." If the older brother cares 
to be at home, he will save the younger. Even 
if the club were all that the best of them claim 
to be for the individual member, still that 
member, if he has a family, may have no right 
to the personal indulgence of membership, if it 
involves injustice to his wife or neglect of his 
home. The wife cannot be a good mother if 
she is a neglected wife, she cannot command 
the respect of her children, especially her boys. 
The children cannot be expected to grow up 
into good men and wornen if home is not to 



88 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

them " the dearest spot on earth," and it never 
will be that if slighted by father or mother. 

Robert Southey, the poet, in a letter to his 
friend makes this statement: " I have declined 
being a member of a literary club which meets 
at the Chapter Coffee House. Surely a man 
does not do his duty who leaves his wife to sol- 
itude, and I feel duty and happiness to be 
inseparable. I am happier at home than any 
society can possibly make me." We may be 
sure that the home life in that family was re- 
fined, sweet and attractive. Now, I do not 
wish to take any extreme ground as to clubs; 
but I have hoped, besides warning against the 
bad, to show the mischief lurking even under 
the acknowledged advantages of good clubs. 
And when Christian young men see these 
dangers to the home and the church, and this 
tendency to self-indulgent personal habits 
which is liable to leave neither money nor 
heart for the Lord's work, I believe they will 
be the first to deny themselves of what before 
may have -looked like a harmless and even 
profitable association with their fellows. " If 
thine eye offend thee, pluck it out. If thine 
hand offend thee, cut it off." No fanatic 
uttered these words, but He who came to bring 
"peace on earth and good will to men," He 
who is the ideal young man, before the minds 
of all our young Christians. 



THE CLUB. 89 

To the Christian young man in the city, who 
has no home, I say: Get one as soon as possi- 
ble! and in the meantime go to work in church, 
and Sabbath-school and Y. M. C. A. and you 
will find companionship and occupation enough, 
if you are a willing worker. 



CHAPTER VIII. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE DANCE. 

In taking up this subject from the Christian 
point of view, it is but fair and right that all 
reasonable concessions should be made, and 
made at the outset. Whatever positive ob- 
jections may be urged against the ordinary 
dance, I for one, am ready to make to the 
friends of this amusement the following 
concessions: 

The dance is not forbidden in the Bible. 

It is not necessarily a. sin per se. 

"It is better to dance than to slander our 
neighbors." 

"It is better to dance than to be self-right- 
eous." 

Amusements as such are necessary and good. 
Every human being is entitled to amusement 
within proper limits. 

The dance may sometime tend to cultivate 
grace of movement. 

If conducted for strictly religious purposes, 
as in the case of David and other cases in the 
Bible, and when the sex element is eliminated, 
it will not be harmful. 

90 



THE DANCE. 9I 

It may, under certain circumstances, be 
health-giving. 

There may be a certain "rhythm and poetry 
of motion" in the dance which is pleasing to 
speculative and ethereal minds, and which has 
no moral or psychological perils. 

If the hearts of young Christians are in the 
dance more than in the cause of Christ, and if 
the parents in the home take no stand against 
it, then all other prohibitions are futile. 

Furthermore, I concede that on this general 
subject there may be good and true Christians 
whose judgment I respect, though widely 
differing from my own. The fair thing in 
every such case is a thorough and candid dis- 
cussion from both points of view. The impor- 
tance of the question in its relation to Chris- 
tian life demands it. 

In full view of these concessions, I feel com- 
pelled to hold that dancing, as it commonly 
prevails in society, is a menace to the Chris- 
tian life and church which needs the imme- 
diate, careful and conscientious consideration 
of all Christian people. 

1. And first of all I protest that the only 
reason for discussing, and the only reason for 
objecting to the dance, on the part of Christian 
parents and teachers, springs from their honest 
solicitude for the welfare of young Christians 
and the efficiency and spiritual power of the. 



0,2 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

Christian church in the world. On this ground 
every disciple of Christ is bound to give the 
subject a reasonable and serious consideration. 
Why should any man or woman or intelligent 
church oppose the dance, if it can be shown 
that it promotes both spiritual and physical 
good? No sane person does so oppose it. It 
is the sheerest prejudice and bigotry for any 
class of people to affirm that Christians are ob- 
jecting to the dance without experimental 
reasons, or on merely apriori grounds. Why 
have the old dancing habits of the Christian 
church been given up in so many places? Why 
have Christian pastors and parents and organi- 
zations in modern times spoken so often and 
so strongly against the common dance? Simply 
because they have found that it was hurtful to 
the end for which the church exists. All the 
objections to the dance that I know of are 
drawn directly from experience. The objections 
may be wrong, but it is right and reasonable 
that they should be faithfully and conscien- 
tiously discussed by all God's people. I pro- 
test, once for all, that the Christian religion is 
not at war with good manners, grace of motion 
or any safe and innocent amusement. 

2. I hold that it is perfectly reasonable to 
expect a fair and candid consideration of this, 
as of other questions, by young Christians 
themselves, unless parents and teachers fall 



THE DANCE. 93 

into the habit of talking to them like cranks; 
which we do not propose to do. My own ex- 
perience with intelligent young people is, that 
they are as reasonable and conscientious on 
this and kindred subjects as older Christians, 
when they once stop and thi?ik. What I plead 
for here is simply this: "Think on these things." 
Young people do not object to any calm and 
sensible queries as to what may injure their 
physical life and comfort, or their success in 
business, or their efficiency and power in intel- 
lectual pursuits. Why then should there be 
any sensitiveness about the minutiae of charac- 
ter and spiritual culture, which touch more 
closely the real man and woman? Why use 
care and caution as to that which may affect 
the exterior and the subordinate interests, and 
take at haphazard that which may " weaken or 
ruin the more important qualities of the soul?" 

3. We confidently believe that if a reason- 
ablyjust case is fairly made out against the 
dance, as tending to injure in any degree the 
purity and power of the Christian life, young 
Christians will readily refrain. To assume 
anything else is to assume that they are not 
Christians. 

Turning, then, to positive views against the 
dance as generally conducted and participated 
in by many church members, we have to say: 

First, that, as we concede that dancing is not 



Q4 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

forbidden in the Bible, neither is it com- 
manded. Christ did not dance, that we know 
of, and left no command that his disciples 
should. But all that this proves either way is 
that the purpose of the Scriptures is to give 
general principles for the new life, and so leave 
us the great benefit of deciding for ourselves, 
in view of those principles and in the light of 
personal experience, how we shall apply them 
in a given case. There can be no doubt that 
this is a part of divine wisdom. It is essential 
to the building of righteous character that we 
all should be permitted, nay required, to decide 
cases of casuistry which affect spiritual life, 
each one for himself in the court of his own 
soul, and in the sanctuary of his closet, where 
he communes with God. 

Secondly, we wish to say the dance is not a 
necessity to amusement and recreation. Every 
individual is entitled to amusement and recrea- 
tion. The demand for it is itself the gift of 
God. But the dance does not constitute any 
essential part of it. If, therefore, there is any 
serious objection to the dance on moral or 
other grounds, we are under no necessity what- 
ever to rescue or reclaim it from its attendant 
perils. We can all, if we choose, have all the 
amusement and recreation which our natures 
require or can wisely bear, without resorting to 



THE DANCE. 9$ 

anything the inevitable tendency of which is to 
abuse and danger. 

Thirdly. Experience has demonstrated, as 
I shall show further on, that devotion to the 
popular dance, even in its best and most con- 
servative form, is not only not fitted to promote 
the highest elements of character, but on the 
other hand that it makes people less open and 
sensitive to religious truth. The Rev. Dr. H. 
M. Tenney, who was for several years the wise, 
and cautious, and efficient pastor of a city 
church where dancing prevailed, says: "I have 
found that those under the spell of these 
amusements (dancing, card playing, etc.) are 
the hardest to reach with the truth. They are 
the last to be reached and the first to backslide. 
If others have had a different experience, I 
have yet to hear of it." If it be said that it is 
not in the use but only in the abuse of the 
dance, that the evil lies, and that any and 
every good thing when abused becomes an evil, 
then we are compelled to take issue on that 
point. The evil tendency lies not in the abuse, 
but in the nature of the thing. Out of all the 
multitudinous forms of amusement there is 
hardly one in fifty that is, from its nature, at all 
liable to serious moral abuse. The promiscuous 
dance from its very nature, like card playing 
and wine drinking, is extremely liable to such 
abuse. Not that it is often engaged in with 



g6 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

evil motives; not that it cannot be practiced 
without evil thoughts; but no one will deny that 
there is in the dance where both sexes are 
mingled an undue excitement, a peculiar and 
absorbing fascination, an extreme tendency to 
excess and dissipation, which is found in con- 
nection with almost no other amusement, and 
which high spiritual life seldom withstands. 
Dr. Jas. H. Jackson, of Dansville, N. Y., while 
believing in the physical benefit of the dance 
if it can be kept within certain safe limits, 
makes the following statement: " As dancing 
is generally conducted by those who take part 
in it, I have no hesitation in saying that the 
evil far overbalances the good that comes from 
it; so that it is indefensible, and should not be 
sustained by Christians.'.' After speaking of 
the physiological dangers of the dance, he 
refers to its dissipating effects upon the mind; 
and specifies dissipation, mental perversity, 
loose habits of thought, weakened conscience, 
unfitness for public duty, destroyed sense of 
allegiance to God, " and thus the person is 
prepared to be influenced wrongly in a social 
way." 

Fourthly. This brings us to the real core of 
the Christian objection to the dance — it is nat- 
urally dangerous to social purity. Its chief 
fascination lies in the relation of the sexes. 
Take the element of sex out of the problem 



THE DANCE. 97 

and the dance need not be feared. But as it is 
generally coducted it brings the sexes into im- 
proper relations to each other, and thus sets 
the passions on fire. It is useless to mince 
matters on this point. The danger of the pro- 
miscuous dance lies in the too familiar hand- 
ling of each other's persons when the sexes are 
together. When we add to this the dissipating 
and fascinating attendant circumstances, and 
especially the modes of female dress usually 
adopted for the dance, affording exposure of 
arms and neck and bosom, it is impossible to 
doubt the existence of moral peril. The form 
of dress is doubtless innocently adopted, but it 
is nevertheless a vulgar and subtle, though 
unintentional, temptation to young men of both 
pure and impure mind. Christian young men 
who have previously been habitual dancers 
have repeatedly made this confession. Said 
one, when asked wherein lay its fascination: 
"To speak frankly, it lies in personal contact." 
Said a Philadelphia army officer when first wit- 
nessing a round dance: " If I should see a man 
offering to dance with my wife in that way, I 
would horsewhip him." We do not at all mean 
to imply that many ever join in such a dance 
with deliberate evil intent, but only that it 
blunts certain natural instincts of modesty and 
propriety which were intended of God for the 
guarding of virtue, by allowing daring famil- 

7 



90 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

iarities which would not be tolerated anywhere 
else. No wonder that such a large and liberal- 
minded man as Horace Bushnell should say of 
these forms of the dance: "They are the con- 
trived possibilities of license which belong to 
high life only when it runs low." No wonder 
Gail Hamilton says with her usual force: "The 
very pose of the parties suggests impurity." 
The chief of police has said that "Three- 
fourths of the abandoned girls of New York 
were ruined by dancing." Even the Police 
Gazette once said: " Strange that young ladies 
will allow gentlemen to assume positions and 
take liberties in the public dance that they 
would not allow in their parlors." 

It has been said by still another, " The danc- 
ing hall is the nursery of the divorce court and 
the training ship of prostitution." 

Now, I do not endorse all this strong lan- 
guage, but I quote these sentences because can- 
did and thoughtful people know that there is 
at least a terrible basis of truth for such views. 
Allow me to make at this point two other quo- 
tations from earnest and well-balanced men. 
A young city pastor writes me: "When I came 
to make up my mind for myself as to my own 
personal practice and my advice to others, I 
decided that the way in which I had been 
brought up (and in which I continued while 
dependent upon my parents, out of regard for 



THE DANCE. 99 

their wishes and feelings, if for no other rea- 
son), was on the whole the best way. I 
decided this before I became a minister, and 
the more I have traveled and the more I have 
seen of life in the country and in city, the 
stronger has been my conviction that total 
abstinence from dancing, theater-going and 
card-playing, is the wisest, safest and happiest 
course." Prof. Amos R. Wells says: ''Dancing 
like all Gaul — is divided into three parts: One- 
third is esthetic, one-third is physical exercise, 
one-third is sensual. As to the first — the enjoy- 
ment of the fine music, of beautiful dresses, of 
forms and motions — these may all be had under 
better auspices than in the dance. A woodland 
ramble, a tennis tournament, an archery club, 
bicycle or horseback riding, the concert-room: 
these furnish in God's own way tenfold more 
beauty to the eye and ear than is furnished by 
the finest ball ever given. As for the second 
third, the physical exercise, it is ill-timed, ill- 
placed, ill-environed. Hot air, gaslight, excite- 
ment, midnight crowds, loaded supper tables, 
noise: these make a poor outfit for a gymna- 
sium. Every honest investigator of the dance 
as now practiced in America, will agree that 
the third part into which this heathen Gaul is 
divided is the stronghold of the province. The 
sensuality of the dance makes bold-eyed 
women of soft-eyed maidens; it makes swag- 



100 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

gering rakes of pure lads; it changes love to 
flirtation and a game of flippant shrewdness; it 
makes applicable to manly America Tolstoi's 
terrific strictures on ignoble Russia. It never 
recreates a Christian; it discreates a Christian 
and creates a sensualist." It cannot be denied 
that the dance, even in its best form, almost 
universally leads to excess; that it declines to 
keep within the limits of recreation and runs to 
dissipation; that it often tends to create jeal- 
ousy between the husband and wife; that like the 
theater it is practically impossible to reform or 
reclaim it from abuse; that "the square dance 
cannot be kept square, but is sure to be rounded 
off with the waltz," that " as practiced by the 
world it has about the same relation to immor- 
ality that wine sipping has to drunkenness," that 
" abstinence, therefore, is much more easily 
practicedthan temperance;" and that they who 
speculate on its being divorced from danger 
and made a perfectly and spiritually healthful 
exercise, probably do not understand human 
nature and are only wasting their time. 

Fifthly. Now as to the effect of this habit of 
dancing on the life of the Christian church, 
when practiced by church members, there is a 
remarkable unanimity of testimony which 
earnest-minded young Christians surely can- 
not afford to overlook. It is a very rare thing 
to find a devoted and efficient Christian worker 



THE DANCE. 101 

who is a dancer. I can learn of no man or 
woman with a decidedly evangelistic spirit who 
approves of the dance. It is equally difficult 
to find any church members who are regularly 
and helpfully at the prayer meeting who are at 
all given to the dance. I have not been able 
to discover any church which is known far and 
wide as a power for the kingdom of Christ 
whose members to any large extent patronize 
the dance. My own uniform experience during 
more than twenty years of work has been that 
fathers and mothers who were most earnestly 
devoted to the moral well-being of their child- 
ren, and to the progress of the kingdom of God, 
have shunned and dreaded the influence of the 
dance. I know of noble Christian parents who 
removed their family from a certain city, simply 
to escape that influence. I have corresponded 
with nearly a hundred prominent pastors and 
laymen in different parts of the country on this 
subject, and a very large proportion of the re- 
plies are squarely against the practice of 
dancing by church members, while only five, 
in a very guarded and qualified way, approve. 
A few think there are other things just as in- 
jurious, which is undoubtedly true. We all 
know the position taken by such men as Moody 
and B. Fay Mills on this question. 

Now in saying these things chiefly to young 
Christians, some of whom may be in the habit 



102 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

of promiscuous dancing, I am specially anxious 
to avoid exerting any hasty, crude, or undue 
influence in this matter. My one desire is, 
that my readers should stop and think, and de- 
cide the matter for themselves. That seems to 
be but fair. I am well aware that no church 
rules or ex cathedra, prohibitions are of any use, 
unless the heart and judgment of Christians go 
with them. If the experience of mature Chris- 
tian workers, the world's need of consecrated 
lives, the obligations of our church covenants, 
and the testimonies I have tried here to present, 
when duly and candidly considered, do not 
convince Christian minds; then, there is noth- 
ing for it but "On with the dance." On the 
other hand, if these considerations should con- 
vince any dancing reader that he had better not, 
then I beseech you, don't sit down and mourn 
over the loss of your favorite amusement and 
give it up simply because conscience says you 
must; but give it up cheerfully and joyfully for 
the sake of your Lord and Redeemer, and to 
make room for a larger life and a nobler joy. 

O ye highly honored and richly endowed 
young disciples, called with a high calling to 
bear the great name and walk in the luminous 
steps of the Son of God! Do not dishonor that 
calling. Do not be afraid to exchange the 
pleasures of the flesh for the joys of the Spirit. 
If the dance or any other amusement is a hin- 



THE DANCE. 103 

drance to your Christlike efficiency, cast it from 
you for His dear sake. Look at the poor world 
through His eyes. Behold its needs, its suffer- 
ings, its blindness, its tears and its guilt; hear 
its inarticulate cry for spiritual help, and put 
yourselves eagerly under His supernal banner to 
answer that cry. 

In conclusion, I simply make two quotations 
which I respectfully ask thoughtful mothers to 
ponder; throwing in this parenthesis, that 
while youth are in the home and dependent 
upon their parents, the parents' judgment 
should in all cases settle such a question as this, 
and no attempt should be made on the part of 
the young people to override that judgment. 
The late Dr. Howard Crosby, so forward in 
matters of reform in New York, makes this 
statement: 

"The foundation for the vast amount of do- 
mestic misery and domestic crime which 
startles us often in its public outcroppings was 
laid when parents allowed the sacredness of 
their daughters' persons and the purity of their 
maiden instincts to be rudely shocked in the 
waltz. This vice, by the force of fashion and 
'good society,' has captivated the young and 
deluded the old in the church of Christ, and no 
minister of Christ must utter an uncertain 
sound here." 

Bishop Coxe of western New York says: 



104 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

"The gross, debasing waltz would not be 
tolerated another year if Christian mothers in 
our communion would only set their faces 
against it and remove their daughters from its 
contaminations and their sons from that con- 
tempt of womanhood and womanly modesty 
which it begets." 



CHAPTER IX. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN'S NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. 

No intelligent person will doubt that nights 
and Sundays are among the most wise and 
beneficent arrangements of God for our good. 
The night for physical and intellectual recu- 
peration of exhausted powers; the Sunday for 
the same, but also more especially for the 
keeping of the sense of God in the wOrld and 
the culture of our higher spiritual nature. To 
pervert these to any other uses than those 
which God intended is a blow at our own good 
and the good of society. A certain writer has 
said that " the great difference between young 
men, with regard to the work of self-improve- 
ment, comes from the different manner in 
which they employ their leisure time. How 
are your evenings spent? To what employ- 
ment is your Sunday generally devoted? An- 
swer that question and I will tell you with 
almost absolute certainty whether you are 
growing better or worse in character. If I am 
to decide on a man's character, I desire to know 
nothing more than this: How are his evenings 
and his Sundays passed?" 

This intimates that leisure hours rather than 

105 



106 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

work hours are the time to wisely estimate the 
difference, not only between good and bad 
men but between good and bad tendencies. We 
all know that parents, employers, college offic- 
ers cannot safely judge a boy's character by 
his conduct while the task is on. They have 
to wait and see what he does with his nights 
and Sundays. It is then that temptations come 
and men fall, if they fall at all. " They that 
sleep," said the apostle, "sleep in the night, and 
they that are drunken are drunken in the 
night." Every foul deed, every bad passion, 
seeks the darkness and requires leisure. Thou- 
sands of men, young and old, will work hard all 
day and appear outwardly as well as the best, 
as long as the day's work lasts; but when night 
comes they are off into dissipation and self- 
ruin. 

It is probably manifest to all that these sea- 
sons of cessation from toil and care, which we 
all covet, and which were clearly designed of 
God to be our safeguard against evil, are really 
turned by many into the seasons of the great- 
est danger. Christian people whose aim is to 
make the most of themselves, seize these hours 
with grateful eagerness to improve their minds 
and fortify their spiritual life. The men on the 
moral down-grade seize the same hours to 
gratify appetite and passion. 

There can be no doubt that among immoral 



NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. 10? 

people, Sunday witnesses more sin than any 
other day in the week. The grievous thing 
about it is that our Heavenly Father designed 
Sunday to have exactly the opposite effect. 
He designed it to be a day not only of rest for 
the weary, but a day of rational good cheer, a 
day of high opportunity, a day for the counter- 
acting of the depressing effects of care and toil, 
and for the fortifying of all that is good and 
true. When rightly used it becomes the most 
beneficently educating influence we have. No 
other earthly boon conferred on society can be 
compared with it. Dr. John Lord, after all his 
study of history, ancient and modern, says, 
"To the Sabbath, and to public preaching, 
Christendom owes more than to all other 
sources of moral elevation combined." 

Now when these supreme gifts are perverted, 
of course there comes a reaction. The very 
times which God meant to be used to mitigate 
our hardships and make the soul safe become 
the season when many men are most defense- 
less. We read that when Ptolemy laid siege to 
Jerusalem, the city was well-nigh impregnable 
by nature; but the Jews foolishly believed that 
they must not even defend themselves on the 
Sabbath. Ptolemy soon learned that fact and 
of course made his assault on that day, and the 
city, being undefended, was taken. So it is 
with souls. Satan captures multitudes on Sun- 



I08 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

day, because, although on that day above all 
others they ought to be and might be most 
secure, yet, having perverted the day from 
God's gracious purpose, they are then most 
defenseless. Thus we have a new illustration 
of the fact that the best gifts of God, when 
perverted, are attended with the most disas- 
trous results. 

Now I mention these things to put every 
Christian reader on his guard against the 
thoughtless perversion of leisure time. As to 
evenings, I will only say this in passing: As 
you value your eternal life, as you hope to 
honor Christ, try to have a good purpose, a 
good companion and a good book on hand 
when the day's work is done. Do not leave 
your leisure time open to the solicitations of 
the devil. While you have a home avoid the 
street and be true to the family circle. Culti- 
vate a Christian conscience, and do not forget 
that " Conscience belongs to your leisure no less 
than to your working time." 

On the use of Sunday, I beg leave to make 
two or three further suggestions. I appeal 
now, as always when touching this theme, to 
the disciples of Jesus Christ. For I have no 
hope that those who habitually ignore God, 
break his laws in other matters, will take to 
heart the question of the Sabbath. The hope 
of Sabbath reform is with the Christian church. 



NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. 100, 

We have a right to expect, and do expect, a 
high and commanding position on this subject 
on the part of those who love the Lord Jesus. 

We do not ask any Christian to take extreme 
ground. What Christian people are contending 
for is not what is sneeringly called the "Puritan 
Sabbath." That which is asked for is simply 
the Christian Sabbath, that large-minded con- 
ception of the value of the Lord's Day in its 
relation to ourselves, the nation and the king- 
dom of Christ, which Christianity endorses. 
Public sentiment is swinging now with fearful 
momentum from the Christian to the Parisian 
Sabbath. I ask you, young Christians, who are 
strong and hopeful, to brace yourself against 
this immoral drift. 

First, because it is essential to your own spir- 
itual life. Unless the spirit of simplicity, pu- 
rity, self-control prevails we cannot live a 
Christian life at all. Lose the spirit of self- 
denial and the noble, heroic austerity, if you 
choose to call it so, the consciousness of having 
a high calling and a great mission, and you not 
only will be, but you are already, cut loose from 
Christ. This Sabbath observance for Christians 
is not simply a question of following a given 
rule, or keeping one day in seven in a given 
way; it is the question of taking up our cross 
and following Christ. It is not merely our use- 



HO THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

fulness as children of God, but our spiritual life 
that is at stake. 

Moreover, it is not simply a question of what 
is most easy and convenient for us now, but 
what habits of life shall we form, and how do 
we propose to educate the future. Who does 
not know that spiritual declension in the 
church begins in a vast majority of cases by 
some perversion or abuse of the Sabbath? 
Every Christian is standing to-day in the pres- 
ence of a fearfully low public sentiment on this 
subject. Resistance to it must and does begin 
when Christian life begins, and must and does 
continue as long as Christian life continues. 

For example, it is certain as the sunlight, that 
the printing and selling of a low-toned secular 
newspaper on the Sabbath, not as a necessity, 
not as a philanthropic affair, but simply as a 
business enterprise for the money there is in it, 
as we all know it to be, and the patronizing of 
such a paper by Christians, is indirectly a blow 
at everything which Christianity proposes to 
propagate among men. I know not how all 
church covenants read, but there is probably 
hardly an evangelical church covenant in the 
country that is not indirectly violated when- 
ever Christians patronize the Sunday paper. It 
prepares the way for every other business en- 
terprise to claim Christian patronage on the 
Sabbath, and thus the utter secularization of 



NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. Ill 

the Lord's Day is ushered in. It is high time 
that Christians were done letting Sunday news- 
paper men bulldoze them into silence and 
acquiescence. To be sure it is said, " If you 
fight this thing you will split the church." The 
statement is not true. The only split will be 
between the church and the world. Christ 
came to lay the ax at the root of the tree, not 
the branches. He came with his fan in his 
hand. He came for the " baptism of the Holy 
Ghost and of fire," and ever since, the men who 
really follow him have had to turn the world 
upside down, for it is naturally wrong side up. 

To be sure we are told the Sunday paper and 
Sunday postal work and trains and the Sunday 
saloon " have come to stay." Of course they 
have if they can. But to the disciple of Christ 
nothing has certainly come to stay but the 
kingdom of God. " Come to stay" is begging 
the question. Suppose a burglar comes into 
your home, takes your money, eats your food, 
insults your family, and after kindling a com- 
fortable fire, sits down and announces, " I've 
come to stay." If you are a man, much more 
if you are a Christian, you will gird up your 
loins and roll up your sleeves and say, " We 
will now proceed to settle that question." 

The second reason for bracing ourselves 
against this secularizing drift is the patriotic 
one. If we believe in a Christian civilization 



112 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

for our country, the Sabbath must be kept as a 
religious institution. The following proposi- 
tions I hold to be absolutely true; (i) You 
cannot have a Christian civilization with Christ 
and his precepts left out. (2) You cannot 
have Christ in our civilization without the 
Christian church. (3) You cannot maintain 
the Christian church without the Christian Sun- 
day. There is precisely the same reason for 
maintaining the Christian observance of the 
Sabbath on patriotic grounds that there is for 
the preaching of the gospel itself. Few people 
will doubt that high morality and pure patriot- 
ism are inseparable; and the lesson of history 
is that morality and Sabbath-keeping also go 
hand in hand. Society is degraded as Christi- 
anity is corrupted, and Christianity is corrupted 
as the Sabbath is perverted. Mere financial 
prosperity cannot make men great except "in 
craft and politics and business calculation." Mere 
material greatness and numbers cannot create a 
high moral sentiment, or build a great college, 
or exalt a state unless there is moral vitality 
and lofty self-restraint in citizen, teacher and 
student alike. Only when men are "uncor- 
rupted by the vices of self-indulgence and un- 
seduced by the pleasures of a factitious life" 
can they do anything to help the nation. Vol- 
taire said, "You cannot kill Christianity as long 
as the Sabbath is maintained as a sacred day." 



NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. II 3 

Why? Because the Sabbath is the day when 
the gospel of Christ gets at the people. He 
was shrewd enough to see where the strength 
of Christianity lay, while many Christians of 
our day do not seem to discover it. 

Hence we say again, self-sacrifice cannot sur- 
vive without religion, and religion and our 
country are bound up forever with the observ- 
ance of the Christian Sabbath. It is on this 
ground that every Christian and every patriot 
ought to fight to the last, for the Sunday closing 
of the Columbian Exposition. I believe that 
in the last analysis we must hold not only the 
commissioners but also the government of the 
United States itself responsible, if that great 
national business enterprise is open on the 
Lord's Day. If the government has appointed 
men to take charge of so momentous a national 
enterprise as the Columbian Exposition, who 
have no just appreciation of the moral integrity 
and honor of the nation, then the settling of 
the Sunday question ought not to be left to 
such commissioners. The responsibility is with 
the appointing power. 

These considerations of the relations of na- 
tional morality to the observance of the Sab- 
bath may be laughed at by the saloon-keeper 
and the Sunday publisher who propose to make 
money at the expense of public morals, but 
surely no Christian can afford to laugh. 



114 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

My space permits me to offer but one re- 
mark more. It is of extreme importance that 
they who are preaching, or who are going to 
preach the gospel, should be roused to right 
convictions on this subject. God forbid that I 
should misjudge my brethren in this or any 
other matter; but the evidence seems to be 
that the majority of pastors have been negli- 
gent of duty in trying to enforce the Word of 
God upon the minds of old and young in its 
bearing on the Sabbath question. We hear of 
comparatively very few preaching on this 
theme, and there is no subject on which it is 
more difficult to get up an enthusiastic con- 
vention than this. Frequently in such a con- 
vention the most able and popular speakers 
have the merest ghost of an audience. If the 
pastors were awake and active, surely the 
people could not be so apathetic. That the 
same trouble seems to prevail in Great Britain 
is indicated by the fact that a prize of fifty 
pounds has recently been offered in Scotland 
for the best essay on "A Christian minister's 
duty with reference to the Sabbath." The 
author who took the prize, says: "Let the 
ministers of our land have the full light of the 
Bible concerning God's mind on the Sabbath, 
and their own duty in relation to it streaming 
into their minds, and the problem is solved. 
If from the central position which the ministers 



NIGHTS AND SUNDAYS. 115 

occupy, laxness on their parts leads to indiffer- 
ence in others, it is just as true that luminous 
and full-orbed conviction on their part will tell 
powerfully in the same direction." 



CHAPTER X. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN, AND THE DESECRATION 
OF SABBATH. 

In the preceding number, we have spoken of 
the young Christian's use of the Sabbath from 
the point of view of leisure time. But the sub- 
ject would be quite inadequately discussed 
without some consideration of the profounder 
topic of the attitude of the churches into which 
young Christians are united, toward Sabbath 
desecration. The question is, to what extent 
are Christian people responsible for public 
sentiment in regard to Sabbath observance? 
The settling of this question, that is, the posi- 
tion now taken by the churches into which 
young Christians are born, will do much to de- 
termine the Christian life of the next genera- 
tion. 

Probably all Christian people will assent to 
the following propositions: 

1. The Sabbath is made for man. It is an 
institution given of God. It is a boon and not 
a burden. 

2. The maintenance of the Sabbath is essen- 
tial to the success of the gospel, and hence to 
the well-being of the race. 

116 



SABBATH DESECRATION. I If 

3. There is just now in our country an 
amazing disregard and desecration of the 
Sabbath. 

4. The Christian church itself has very 
largely fallen into this sin of Sabbath dese- 
cration. 

5. The remedy for the evil lies primarily 
with the church. 

6. If the church cannot save the Sabbath, it 
can neither save itself nor the world. 

With these propositions in view, let us look 
first at the cause of Sabbath desecration. We 
are sometimes told that the cause of Sabbath 
desecration in our day is a reaction from the 
overstrict Sunday laws of colonial times. I do 
not think that is true. Not one in ten thousand 
knows anything about the colonial Sabbath 
laws, or ever thought of associating his present 
practice with the Puritan Sabbath as a cause. 
Nor is the cause want of proper legislation. 
The Sunday laws of the country are vastly in 
advance of the practice of the people. The 
whole system of Sabbath desecration has 
grown up not from lack of law, but in defiance 
of law. Every State in the Union, except Cali- 
fornia and Arizona, has Sunday laws prohibit- 
ing ordinary labor and traffic, except those of 
"necessity and mercy." The cause is not the 
change from the seventh to the first day of the 
week. There never was a more superficial 



Il8 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

blunder than to maintain that the reason people 
desecrate the Christian Sabbath is because we 
are trying to keep the wrong day. The real 
cause has many phases. I will specify but 
three: 

i. The tremendous and universal spirit of 
self-indulgence, the love of luxury and pleasure, 
and the love of money for pleasure's sake. 

2. Foreign immigration. These millions of 
immigrants, 800,000 a year, do not come here 
as our fathers did, for liberty of conscience, but 
for bread. They come from the lands of the 
lost Sabbaths, and without either knowledge of 
or respect for our American Lord's Day. They 
are not to blame for this, but we are, for not 
enlightening them. "It is not health, but 
disease that is contagious." 

3. The saloon. The liquor business is the 
school where lawlessness and godlessness are 
cultivated on principle, and where Sabbath 
desecration is a part of the stock in trade. The 
worst result of this "scourge of God," which 
openly defies all Sunday laws, is its tremendous 
influence on public sentiment with reference 
to laws in general. When the honest grocer or 
dry goods merchant sees the saloon-keeper with 
open shop on Sunday, setting the law at de- 
fiance, of course he asks: "Why should not I 
have the same privilege? If he is allowed to 
sell that which debauches society, why should 



SABBATH DESECRATION. II9 

I heed a law which prevents me from supply- 
ing men's legitimate demands?" And so he 
opens his store; and the law is a dead letter. 
This discriminating toleration in favor of 
drunkard makers and corrupters of youth is 
more than many characters can bear. The 
sight of grog-shops scooping in the earning of 
working men on the Sabbath for that which 
only curses them, leads many a citizen to open 
his store and get a part of the trade. His con- 
science gives way to his mercantile ambition; 
then the value of his testimony against law- 
breaking is lost. The same is true of other de- 
partments of traffic. The godless merchant 
not only claims the right to travel in the in- 
terest of his business on Sunday, but also to 
have his goods transported. The Christian 
merchant under the pressure of competition 
feels that he must do the same or fail. Hence 
the gross injustice to the railroad men, and the 
general defiance of Sunday law. So also god- 
less publishers press their Sunday papers on 
the community, and Christian people living in 
a low spiritual atmosphere, satisfy their secular 
curiosity on Sunday morning by reading them. 
Thus the church and the world are constantly 
acting and reacting on each other, and tending 
to find a common level. The church of God 
first acquiesces, then patronizes, then defends, 
until its power to help the world is gone. 



120 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

The great want, then, is not better laws, but 
better public sentiment. Not more law, but 
more conscience. 

The most discouraging phase of the Sunday 
question is the decay of reverence for law in 
general. Look at it. The old colonial Sunday 
laws were some of them grotesque and un- 
reasonable. But notice, these rigid laws were 
not a dead letter. John Barnes was fined 
thirty shillings for Sabbath breaking. For a 
second offence "he was set in the stocks and 
whipped at the post." It is not the wisdom of 
these laws we commend, but the law-abiding 
spirit. I say these rigid laws were enforced. 
The magistrate was on the side of the law, and 
the people at the back of the magistrate. How 
is it now? Our Sunday laws are mild and 
reasonable in the extreme, but they are a dead 
letter. What does this mean? It means a de- 
cay of reverence for law. It means the sup • 
planting of the great idea of duty by the exag- 
gerated notion of liberty and license. Now, 
I say, this is the most discouraging phase of 
the Sunday problem. Mr. Evarts truly said: 
" The welfare of the country depends not on the 
laws in the book, but on the laws that are 
enforced." 

Another phase of the subject is the too com- 
mon acquiescence of Christian people in this 
state of things. Of course, but few Christians 



SABBATH DESECRATION. 121 

openly approve Sabbath desecration; but many 
say, the Sunday paper has come to stay, the 
railroad traffic will go on, the Sunday mails 
must be carried, the saloon cannot be closed, 
cheese factories will run on Sunday, " the peo- 
ple are set on mischief;" and so we might as 
well read the Sunday secular paper when it is 
printed, we might as well send our milk to the 
factory since it is open anyway, we might as 
well take the Sunday train to attend to our 
secular business since the train is running 
whether we go or not. Yes, and we might as 
well license the saloon, for it will be open seven 
days in the week in any case. What is the use 
of Christian people incurring the odium of the 
world by struggling against the inevitable? 
Let us rather adapt ourselves to the circum- 
stances and do as well as we can. That is the 
way we begin to talk. 

It reminds one of the case of Aaron when he 
had made the golden calf. What an imbecile 
defense he offered when the prophet of God 
came down from the mountain. Instead of 
standing as a man in his high position ought to 
have stood, making public sentiment, he simply 
succumbed to the low public sentiment of the 
hour and laid the blame on " the people": " I 
am not to blame, the people are set on mischief. 
I just took their jewels and put them into the 
fire, and there came out this calf." It is to be 



122 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

feared that many a Christian church is repeat- 
ing that argument to-day. Whenever the 
church adapts itself to the public sentiment of 
the world, it is doomed. It ought to make 
Christians blush to know that some of the 
strongest words against the desecration of the 
Sabbath by railroad traffic have been uttered 
by railroad men. The timidity of Christians 
springs from the assumption that railroad traf- 
fic, which keeps 250,000 men at work on Sun- 
day, is a " necessity." But many railroad 
managers deny the fact. If any railroad busi- 
ness is justifiable on the Sabbath, it is that 
which has to do with perishable freight; but 
Robert Harris, of the Union Pacific road, says 
even freight business is not a necessity on Sun- 
day. Freight business was not carried on on 
Sunday until the time of the war, and we did 
well enough without it. He says: "The busi- 
ness men in the cities have no right to demand 
that their fellow men on the railroad shall 
work for them on Sunday to bring their goods 
to hand while they enjoy their liberty." Sam- 
uel Sloan, of the Delaware, Lackawana & 
Western Railway, says: "The necessity for 
Sunday trains does not exist." The president 
of a Wisconsin Railway says: "It is practica- 
ble to abolish Sunday work." Col. Wright, of 
the Massachusetts Bureau of Statistics, says: 
11 The way to diminish Sunday trains is to 



SABBATH DESECRATION. 1 23 

diminish the patrons of them." Gen. A. S. 
Diven, a man of vast experience, submits the 
following propositions: 

1. Traffic will be substantially the same per 
week whether moved in 168 hours or 144 hours. 

2. It can be moved in 144 hours. 

3. The extra cost will be compensated by 
improved service. 

4. There is no public necessity requiring 
Sunday service. 

I apply these propositions to all service in 
time of peace, both passenger and freight. 

If this be true of freight business, it must be 
emphatically so of all other branches of Sun- 
day labor. No one can honestly maintain that 
a Sunday paper, or cheese factory, or open 
store, or saloon is either a necessity or a mercy. 
They are simply a selfish convenience. 

Why then this timidity and discouragement 
on the part of Christian people in grappling 
with this tremendous hindrance to the kingdom 
of Christ? 

Christians are surely responsible for the des- 
ecration of the Sabbath to the extent of their 
ability to prevent it. In 1886 there was one 
communicant to 4.8 of the population of the 
United States; one evangelical church to 518 
souls; one minister to 692 souls. Who can 
estimate the power of such a body to prevent 
Sabbath desecration, if only united and loyal 



124 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

to the gospel of Christ? We must assume that 
church members are either real Christians, or 
are subject to church discipline. Real Chris- 
tians are willing to forego even some legitimate 
luxuries for the sake of promoting the kingdom 
of God, much more the vices which are sapping 
the foundations of spiritual life, destroying all 
reverence for law. There is just as much rea- 
son for encouragement in urging this as any 
other form of gospel truth. We have had some 
marked encouragement even in Ohio, notwith- 
standing the liquor oligarchy and the cowardly 
utterances of some partisan political papers of 
the State. 

It seems to me perfectly clear, therefore, that 
what the Sabbath reform requires is not prima- 
rily more legislation, not an attack on railway 
companies or publishing companies, but an 
awakening of Christian principles, an arousing 
of Christian conscience and devotion on the 
part of the people at large and especially in 
the bosom of the church. What have we to 
oppose to the rapacity of commercial and in- 
dustrial competition, or to the insolent dicta- 
tion of law-defying liquor men? Nothing, I 
believe, but the church of Jesus Christ; nothing 
but the law of God. If that falters, all hope is 
gone. It is not the province of the church 
directly to make Sunday laws, but it is its 
province to make the sentiment which makes 



SABBATH DESECRATION. 12$ 

the laws and sustains them. Christ did not 
commit his cause to the civil magistrate or to 
the law makers of the Roman Empire. He 
said to his disciples, " Ye are the salt of the 
earth." 

The first responsibility resting upon the 
church is to help sustain the Sunday laws of 
the state. They are far in advance of the senti- 
ments of many professing Christians. 

But the church is also bound to help the 
world " remember the Sabbath day to keep it 
holy." Its mission is not simply conservative, 
but aggressive. It is the one institution which 
is to stand when thrones and tyrannies are 
passed away. It never stands simply for what 
is, but always for what ought to be. The true 
church is not, as the Socialists tell us, in favor 
of the present order of things. It is an eternal 
agitator. It never acquiesces in the conditions 
of the present as long as there is a wronged or 
suffering soul. Politicians, parties, institutions 
may work simply to conserve what is, but the 
church of God has a different mission. No 
custom of society, however venerable, no pres- 
tige of class or position, no alarm about per- 
sonal liberty, falsely so-called, no laws of states 
however powerful, can ever nullify that eternal 
" ought to be " toward which the Christian 
church must urge its prayer and prepetually 



126 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

press its aim. If it fails of this, there is nothing 
to take its place. 

The laws are a dead letter because moral senti- 
ment is low, and because a mercenary spirit of 
acquiesence, which is sapping the foundations 
on which all laws are based, has crept even into 
the church. As a Cincinnati pastor said two 
years ago, the church is faithful enough in pre- 
senting the sentimental, the esthetic, the tender 
side of religion, but too lax in pressing the 
manly, vigorous, aggressive side of the gospel. 

How, then, is the church to become the 
power which its divine mission warrants and 
which the cause demands? 

In general, it is plain that to accomplish any- 
thing in this cause, the church must clear its 
own skirts. " Be ye clean that bear the vessels 
of the Lord." It must apply the principle, 
" Physician, heal thyself." This surely is funda- 
mental. It is an inconsistency at which the 
world will justly laugh, for Christians to com- 
plain of railroad companies, while they patron- 
ize the Sunday trains; or demand that their 
goods shall be carried on Sunday, while they 
piously attend church. It is an inconsistency 
for churches to condemn the publishers of Sun- 
day secular papers, while hundreds of their 
members spend Sabbath morning reading them. 

And so with all other forms of Sunday des- 
ecration. It all comes to this: that churches 



SABBATH DESECRATION. 1 27 

must stand by their principles or else hold their 
peace. Their weakness in all moral reforms is 
their partial complicity with the wrong. I am 
only claiming that church members should be 
honest enough to stand by their profession. 
We are making the future. And if this dete- 
riorating process goes on, it need not be a matter 
of surprise to anyone to see laws become less 
and less a barrier to wrong, and religion less 
and less a power to lift the world. Fathers and 
mothers of this generation need not be surprised 
if their children seem to stand on a lower spir- 
itual plane, and have greater obstacles to moral 
manhood and womanhood to overcome than 
they themselves had. And the children of this 
generation need not be astonished at the brood 
of evils that shall come in upon them in later 
years. For their own fathers and mothers, 
many of them in the church of Christ, have 
helped to open the door by which the evils are 
coming in. This apathy of the church, this 
self-indulgent spirit of the present age, with 
respect to this subject, is a piece of infinite 
cruelty to the next generation of Christians. 
Let the Christian church purify itself. That 
is the essential condition of all right influence. 
To accomplish this, the first step is to agitate, 
agitate kindly, lovingly, but firmly, not with 
passion, but with argument and the Word of 
God. Keep the subject hot and pressed upon 



128 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

the public mind, till the church shall feel its 
duty. Christian agitation in this, as in other re- 
forms, is God's weapon, which the church is 
bound to wield. 

Second. Press the Word of God. It is well 
enough to urge on physical grounds the im- 
portance of the law which secures one day of 
rest from toil in every seven; but after all, it is 
this Word of God that sustains the sentiment 
which sustains the law. If there is no great 
moral principle behind the Sunday law it can- 
not stand. If the sense of God and eternity is 
not kept in the world, no law of mere physical 
expediency will long remain. The selfishness 
of one-half of the world will compel the other 
half to work seven days in the week. The final 
bulwark of the Sabbath is not the social, or the 
legal, but the religious sentiment. The business 
of the church is to propagate that sentiment 
and to keep the sense of God in the world. So, 
I say, we must press the Bible. We must stand, 
like our fathers, by " the Book, the Day, and 
the Church." The Sabbath must be made to 
appear as it is, as sustaining a definite relation, 
not simply to men's physical comfort, but to 
men's eternal weal, and as involving an eternal 
obligation to God — or the whole matter will 
sink to the level of mere humanitarian ex- 
pediency, which men will accept or reject ac- 
cording as it suits their selfish ends. 



SABBATH DESECRATION. 1 29 

Third. If the church is to have any manly 
force on this subject, it must make it a con- 
dition of membership that communicants shall 
"remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy." 
It must be understood that the habitual patron- 
izing of any of these Sabbath-breaking insti- 
tutions on the Sabbath, shall be a disciplinable 
offense. In many places this cannot be done 
at once. Agitation and Christian discussion 
must precede, but it can be done. We need not 
fear to take high ground on this subject. The 
laws of God and the laws of the state, together 
with the prayers of overtaxed millions, are at 
our backs. Before a united and determined 
and consecrated church no evil can stand. 

The immediate danger is silence and inaction. 
I know there are difficulties in the way of this 
reform, and these difficulties multiply more and 
more as we lower our standard and lose the 
spirit of Christ. But they can be and must be 
overcome if the kingdom of God is to prevail. 

My appeal, then, is to the men and women of 
God. I ask you to consider what the Christian 
Sabbath has been to you and yours. Think of 
the inseparable connection between it and your 
Christian life. Think of the blessed calm it has 
brought to you in the midst of corroding cares, 
the respite it has given you from crushing toil, 
the aspirations it has awakened for a better life. 
Think how essential it is to the progress of 



130 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

Christ's kingdom. Think of the vows you have 
taken to sustain God's cause, and the mighty 
obligations you are under to meet the moral 
needs of the world. And then see if you can 
afford, for any paltry convenience, to lower the 
public reverence for law, or to sacrifice the 
priceless treasure of the Sabbath. 

I appeal to my brethren in the ministry, with 
whom the immediate responsibility rests, to dis- 
cuss the subject frequently, broadly, fearlessly, 
in the spirit of the Master, till Christ's prin- 
ciples are enthroned in the hearts of the rich 
and poor. 



CHAPTER XL 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND SOCIAL PURITY. 

Do I run some risk in touching publicly this 
theme? Be it so. The importance of the subject 
will justify the risk. Polite licentiousness is 
one of the greatest hindrances to the kingdom 
of God to-day as it was in ancient Ephesus. It 
is seldom touched by the press and hardly can 
be by the pulpit for fear of offending refined 
taste. But refined taste, itself sometimes the 
offspring of this evil, must not be allowed to 
get up "a conspiracy of silence" which leaves 
inexperienced youth unwarned, and casts a veil 
over social vices which are sapping the foun- 
dations of society. Can this subject be dis- 
cussed with such delicacy and care as to do 
good and not harm? I believe it can, because I 
believe in the Word of God. There is no other 
vice in regard to which the Bible speaks with 
such fullness and explicitness of language as 
that of licentiousness. One reason is because 
there is no other vice to which human life, in 
the church and out of it, is so subtly and con- 
stantly tempted, or which is so destructive to 
moral character. Jesus Christ spoke out on this 
subject to Christians not only with infinite wis- 
dom, but with terrible plainness. The obvious 

131 



132 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

reason for this is that Christian character does 
not consist in a fair exterior. There may be 
licentiousness of the mind, which is fatal to all 
morals, while clean thoughts, pure imaginations, 
are always fundamental to Christian life. The 
supreme Beatitude is, " Blessed are the pure in 
heart, for they shall see God." A religion which 
only restrains from overt acts of vice, and does 
not purify the imagination, and sanctify the 
secret thoughts is false. Salvation itself is moral 
cleanness. Hence Christ, in 'his sublime fidelity 
to his disciples, uttered that statement, which 
in every generation blanches the face of man: 
" I say unto you that whosoever looketh on a 
woman to lust after her hath committed adul- 
tery with her already in his heart." The sin 
that damns men lies in the secret thoughts of 
the mind. The mind of man is the man him- 
self — the whole of him. The mind is the im- 
mortal part which is to share God's immortality. 
A fair outside and a corrupt mind is a whited 
sepulcher. No wonder God " desires truth in 
the inward parts." No wonder the man of God 
cried, "Cleanse me from hidden faults." 

But the principal reason for speaking to 
young Christians on this subject is not that they 
intentionally give way to the temptation to so- 
cial vice, but that so many, unwittingly, fall in- 
to the blunder of exposing themselves to cer- 
tain forms of its danger for what they consider 



SOCIAL PURITY. • 1 33 

a justifiable reason. Thousands of young men, 
especially, expose themselves to fatal social 
perils, in order, as they claim, to broaden their 
experience, and give them a larger knowledge 
of the world. They persuade themselves that 
it is important even for Christians to see more 
of the world; that they ought to witness for 
themselves some of the forms of depravity of 
which they hear, and which they are to fight. 
Thus sometimes, with a good motive perhaps, 
but more often from a mere prurient curiosity, 
and always with an utterly false judgment, they 
venture, as mere eye-witnesses, into places of 
dissipation and infamy where no Christian ought 
to go. And because they are only well-mean- 
ing spectators, seeking a knowledge of the 
world, and escape without overt act of sin them- 
selves, they think they receive no harm. This 
is a fatal mistake. And it is not so unusual a 
thing even among very respectable young men, 
as many good people hope and believe. 

The writer had his eyes opened to this fact 
not long ago, by a conversation with a young 
man who had spent the summer in Europe. He 
belonged to a good church-going family in one 
of the Atlantic States. I think he was not a 
church member,' but an upright, moral young 
man. He stated with an air of superior ex- 
perience that while in Paris he "determined to 
see the very worst as well as the best of that 



134 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

city," and he did. He sought out three or four 
other young men, and they visited together the 
most fashionable and the most debased places 
of infamy. He stoutly affirmed that he went 
simply to gain a knowledge of the world, with 
no foul intention, and committed no criminal 
act; and I believe he told the truth. After 
describing in cold blood the unreportable things 
he saw and heard among the degraded women, 
his closing reflection was that his experience 
had made him almost "lose faith in woman- 
kind." At this my soul was on fire with in- 
dignation. I said to him: 

"Did it ever occur to you to lose faith in 
yourself? You go to that most licentious city 
on the globe, you choose certain companions, 
you mistake a prurient curiosity for a better 
motive, you smell out those hells of nastiness 
where poor women, by slow degrees, and 
through the aggressive sin of men have sunk to 
the lowest pit; you visit them, see and learn all 
that there is, and come away very virtuous, to 
tell of your superior experience to other men, 
young and old, who are thus contaminated and 
tempted by your knowledge; and the result is 
that most of them will 'lose faith in woman,' as 
you did. You have possessed yourself of secrets 
which you can never reveal to sister or mother, 
and which, if publicly known, would make you 
distrusted and despised by all honorable women, 



SOCIAL PURITY. 1 35 

in that ' best society' in which you move. The 
truth is, the one person you should lose faith in 
first of all is yourself. You think it has been 
no damage to you. You are all wrong. You 
will carry a wound in your soul in the form of 
a tainted imagination to your grave, and every 
companion to whom you retail your experience, 
unless specially forearmed by Christ, will suffer 
a similar wound." 

This conversation leads me to say to Christian 
young men, with all the energy of my being, 
that personal experience in vice is not neces- 
sary to the most effective warfare upon it. The 
motive which leads one to acquaint himself 
personally with social vice as a means of be- 
coming more useful as a Christian is not of 
God, but of the devil. It is contrary to both 
Christ's precept and example. It will give you 
experience at the expense of spirituality. The 
clean soul is the soul that God can use. 
" Blessed are the pure in heart for they shall 
see God." The " heart " in the Bible means 
generally " mind." What I plead for here is a 
pure mind. It must be pure if we are to be 
Christians. The terrible effect of familiarity 
with social vice is that it taints the imagination. 
The imagination is one of the noblest powers 
of the mind. By it we rise above the things of 
sight, and even of reason, and hold converse 
with the infinite. It is extremely influential in 



I36 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

the formation of character. But from its very 
nature it is more easily corrupted, and more 
terrible in its effects when degraded than any 
other faculty. It is not through reason or judg- 
ment, but through the imagination, that the 
tempter generally comes. Seduce the imagin- 
ation and the light of the soul goes out. Many 
persons with fair exterior indulge in forming 
imaginary pictures, the reality of which would 
be crime. The very passing of a base imagin- 
ation through the mind leaves a stain which 
cannot be effaced on earth. For memory al- 
ways co-operates with imagination and repro- 
duces and dwells on the debasing thought, or 
disgusting sight, or licentious phrase, till its 
pollution is prepetuated in the soul. Then, no 
time, nor place, nor occupation is^ too sacred 
to be intruded upon by such infernal fancies. 
The very sanctuary of God is not exempt. 
Hence the gospel too often falls on listless ears 
and a torpid moral nature. The very temple of 
the immortal mind becomes polluted. 

No wonder God desires truth in the inward 
parts. No wonder he insists in his redemptive 
work upon " temperance," chastity, self-control, 
the dominion of reason and conscience over the 
passions and affections. Think what a value 
God sets upon the mind. He made it in his 
own image, for high and holy uses. But see 
what it becomes when corrupted imagination 



SOCIAL PURITY. 1 37 

takes the throne. See how the moral sensibil- 
ities shrivel and die. See how fine mental 
powers become crippled and the spiritual life 
blasted in the bud. See how many a man sim- 
ply by opening " eye gate" and "ear gate," as 
that young man did in Paris, to the allurements 
of the flesh, changes a noble intellectual endow- 
ment into a kennel of unclean thoughts which 
are not fit to be uttered anywhere but in hell. 

Nothing clouds and deadens the moral sense, 
and therefore nothing defeats the gospel of life 
in the unconverted, and nothing will sooner 
kill all spiritual energy in a church member 
than the habit of licentious thoughts. We 
sometimes wonder what ails certain outwardly 
moral young men that they do not lay hold of 
the gospel. Ah! the worst thing possible is the 
matter. A worm is at the root of the char- 
acter. They have exposed their sensitive souls 
through " eye gate " and " ear gate" to pollut- 
ing sights and sounds, and have become the 
victims of a tainted imagination. That is not 
all. The pollution of the mind is contagious. 
The minds of young men, in the church and 
out of it, are constantly coming into contact 
with each other. One corrupted imagination 
in a community of young people is a menace to 
the whole. 

While returning from England last summer 
when we were about in the middle of the At- 



I38 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

lantic, the attention of all on board was arrested 
by some great black object on the sea. As we 
drew nearer, it proved to be an old huge hulk 
of a vessel, apparenty capsized and utterly 
wrecked, no rudder, no sail, no anchor, no sign 
of life. Where or when it was wrecked, or who 
once owned it, or what was its cargo, or what 
had become of its crew, n j one could tell. 
There it w T as, alone and desolate, but eloquently 
suggestive, in mid-ocean. No shore within 
reach to be drifted to, no haven to enter, no 
rest from the eternal agitation of the deep. 
Once a thing of beauty, almost a thing of life; 
now a black, helpless thing, swinging and heav- 
ing, and tossing, and dashing, and drifting, 
night and day, day and night, through the 
weeks and months, and years, at the mercy of 
the merciless waves. I am told that there are 
many such floating in the sea, never getting 
very far away from where they were wrecked, 
but drifting about in the general pathway of 
navigation, and that they are a source of se- 
rious danger to vessels by coming into collision 
with them in the night. 

This impressed me very profoundly, for it set 
me to thinking of certain human souls out on 
the sea of life; souls made for noble purposes 
and high ends, but wrecked, spiritually drifting, 
never far from the place where they were 
wrecked, but always in the line of human life, 






SOCIAL PURITY. 1 39 

and inexpressibly dangerous to otherunsuspect- 
ing souls. In the sphere of moral influence 
there is nothing more to be dreaded by young 
people than a polluted soul, moving about in 
society, boasting of a superior knowledge of the 
world and communicating the contagion of its 
tainted imagination to the young men or maid- 
ens who are as yet only beginners in the Chris- 
tian life. We need to shun them as we would 
shun the pestilence, to flee from them as we 
would flee from the avenger of blood. Let the 
divine prayer, "Lead us not into temptation, 
but deliver us from evil," be daily on our lips. 
Let us have done with that Satanic argument 
that young Christians should expose them- 
selves to the contagion of social impurity for 
the purpose of enlarging their experience of 
the world. No man has any right to tempt 
himself and God in that way. Let us keep the 
immortal mind morally clean, and God will use 
the experience we have. 

The dangerous tendency to which I have 
referred, is greatly enhanced by the fearfully 
low standard of public opinion, especially as to 
masculine virtue. It would seem as if the pow- 
ers of darkness had formed an infernal con- 
spiracy to corrupt the bodies and souls of the 
race. I refer to the double standard of morals 
by which public opinion estimates men and 
women in this matter. It seems to be every- 



140 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

where taken for granted in society and even in 
courts of law, that social impurity is but a tri- 
fling offense in men, but an unpardonable crime 
in women. Equally guilty before God, society 
forgives and condones the crime of the man, 
and condemns the woman to infamy. This has 
two terrible results: on one hand, it encourages 
men in guilty self-indulgence, setting a pre- 
mium on aggressive masculine solicitations; on 
the other, it throws the whole responsibility of 
the defense of social virtue on the woman, and 
yet it is equally fraught with moral death to 
both. It makes the one an outcast, the other 
a whited sepulcher. No more accursed sen- 
timent ever prevailed on earth. God speed the 
Christianization of public opinion, "till both in 
theory and in practice it shall recognize the 
fundamental truth that the essense of right and 
wrong is in no way dependent on sex, and shall 
demand of men the same chastity as it demands 
of women." 

The great want in both young and old Chris- 
tians is a living conscience. When God made 
the mountains of New Hampshire, he made 
them largely of granite. He made them very 
beautiful. They are cut and crossed by ravines 
which contain soil enough to support trees and 
plants that gives picturesqueness to the outline. 
They are covered with patches of green in 
spring, and reaches of scarlet flame in autumn, 



SOCIAL PURITY. I4I 

and even the little mountain flower finds its 
place on their sides in summer. But that 
which sustains all this wealth of beauty and 
grandeur is the granite that lies below. So with 
Christian character. That which sustains and 
makes all sorts of moral beauty possible, is the 
granite of the soul; an enlightened, developed, 
tender, Christ-smitten conscience. Without 
that the whole fabric will collapse. What is 
the matter with public sentiment, nay, with our 
church life, on this question of masculine social 
purity? It is the want of the granite of charac- 
ter, a holy conscience, which makes men even 
more loyal to secret honor than to public rep- 
utation; conscience that will make a man real- 
ize that his thoughts must be as pure as the 
thoughts of Christ, if he is to be a Christian at 
all; that he stands day and night in the pres- 
ence of God; that his body is the temple of the 
Holy Ghost; and that will make society brand 
the sinning man with the same stigma that it 
puts upon the sinning woman. To realize such 
a conscience and to emphasize the belief in the 
duty and capacity of every man to so think 
pure thoughts as to reflect the divine image in 
which he was made, Christian souls must feed, 
not on the popular novel, not on the Sunday 
newspaper, but on the Word of God. 

It is wonderful how a little Bible truth clears 
the moral atmosphere, blows away the sophis- 



142 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tries of public sentiment, and girds up the 
"loins of the mind." Let all tempted young 
men commit to memory and daily repeat to 
themselves such words as these: " Remove thy 
way far from the strange woman and come not 
nigh the door of her house, for her house in- 
clineth unto death. She has cast down many 
wounded, yea, many strong men have been slain 
by her. Her house is the way to hell, going 
down to the chambers of death; none that go 
unto her return again, neither take they hold 
of the paths of life. Let not thy heart decline 
to her ways, lest thou mourn at last when thy 
flesh and thy body are consumed, and then say, 
How have I hated instruction and my heart de- 
spised reproof." The man of no understanding 
" goeth after her as an ox goeth to the slaught- 
erer, or as a fool to the correction of the stocks. 
As a bird hasteth to the snare and knoweth not 
that it is for his life." " For this ye know, that 
no whoremonger or unclean person hath any 
inheritance in the kingdom of Christ and of 
God." " For without are dogs and sorcerers 
and whoremongers and murderers and idolaters, 
and whosoever loveth and maketh a lie." " The 
fearful, the unbelieving and the abominable and 
murderers and whoremongers and all liars shall 
have their part in the lake which burneth with 
fire and brimstone which is the second death." 
" Flee also youthful lusts, but follow righteous- 



SOCIAL PURITY. I43 

ness, faith, charity, peace, with them that call 
on the Lord out of a pure heart." " Let no 
corrupt communication proceed out of your 
mouth." " Let ho man say when he is tempted, 
' I am tempted of God.' But every man is 
tempted when he is drawn away of his own 
lusts and enticed. Then when lust hath con- 
ceived it bringeth forth sin, and sin when it is 
finished bringeth forth death." " Ye have heard 
that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt 
not commit adultery, but I say unto you, that 
whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after 
her, hath committed adultery with her already 
in his heart." " If thine eye offend thee, pluck 
it out and cast it from thee; for it is profitable 
for thee that one of thy members perish and 
not that thy whole body should be cast into 
hell." 

" Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall 
see God." 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND MARKET INFIDELITY. 

It is one of the marks of Divine Wisdom 
that Christians are neither immediately taken 
out of the world when converted, nor set apart 
to live in communities by themselves. Their 
great change is inward and spiritual, a change 
of aim and motive, while their social and secu- 
lar relations remain substantially the same. 
Christians and non-Christians are in constant 
contact, and that contact is so close and inti- 
mate that it cannot be otherwise than momen- 
tous to both. This intermingling of converted 
and unconverted souls, this clash of Christian 
faith with Market Unbelief, in the family, the 
store, the railway train, and the street, works 
both ways. It has its advantages and its perils. 
The tendency is to reduce life to a common 
level. Hence the frequently depressed con- 
dition of the church. This does not imply that 
each necessarily adopts the other's views, but 
only that they tend to encroach upon and 
modify each other. 

By Market Infidelity I mean that which we 
see and hear on the street, in the caucus, in 
shops and factories, and in the market-place, 
as distinguished from scientific or philosophi- 

144 



MARKET INFIDELITY. 145 

cal unbelief. It is the infidelity of the mouth 
and of the pocket rather than of the brain. 
It is that which is sold to the populace or to a 
lecture bureau for $200 a night by certain men 
who want to make fun of their mother's faith. 
Now this kind is far more difficult to resist 
than scientific unbelief. The fact that one re- 
jects its statements does not remove its influ- 
ence. It is like the malaria in our valleys; it is 
in the air; it comes to us without leave. To 
try to argue it down is like arguing down the 
Aurora Borealis. It comes most insinuatingly, 
at that critical and tremendously serious trans- 
itional period of life when a young Christian 
is passing, in his religious experience, from a 
faith which has till now rightly rested on the 
testimony of parents and teachers to intelli- 
gent convictions of his own. 

I gladly concede that young Christians very 
seldom so far adopt infidel views as to aban- 
don Christ. Nevertheless their faith is almost 
unconsciously modified; the tone of their spir- 
itual life is lowered, and their courageous, ag- 
gressive usefulness is reduced, by the depress- 
ing atmosphere in which they live. 

Now, one secret of the power of this Market 
Infidelity is its universality. It is everywhere, 
and everywhere vociferous. The secular ed- 
itor prints it for the million. The genteel, but 

godless, business man trades in it. The Sab- 
10 



I46 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

bath-breaker exalts it. The saloon-keeper 
preaches it. The debauchee enjoys it. The 
fashionable club man chooses it. The ward 
politician insinuates it. The long-haired and 
sad-faced sage, who still reads Paine and goes 
to hear Ingersoll, expounds it. The disappoint- 
ed woman throws into it the charm of a beau- 
tiful sentiment. The smug and dapper youth 
who annexes his cap to the back of his head 
and wears bangs like a girl, talks it with the 
confidence of a philosopher. The whole mass 
of non-church-goers practice it, and all half- 
converted, worldly-minded church members, 
who are settled on their lees, and are saying 
with the deists of Zephaniah's time, that "The 
Lord will not do good, neither will he do evil," 
are lending it their indorsement. It is plain 
that however earnestly young Christians may 
repudiate these views theoretically, it is hardly 
in human nature not to be practically modi- 
fied by them. We cannot avoid the market- 
place if we would, and it is not God's plan 
that we should. There is no escape from 
injury except by some divine fortification 
within. 

A second element of the power of the Market 
Infidelity is its positive and repeated claim to 
be new and fresh, the product of "modern 
thought." It is assumed that modern thought 
has pulverized the old faiths; that this popular 



MARKET INFIDELITY. 147 

skepticism is the child of a superior light, a 
wiser culture or a more scientific spirit which 
has arisen in these later days. It says that 
human nature is sufficient of itself; that all it 
needs is scientific development; that it is now 
discovered that there is no need of supernatural 
revelation from God, and if we did need it, it 
would be impossible to get it. 

Now, we run no risk in saying that nearly all 
of the multitudinous phases of modern in- 
fidelity, which the masses are repeating to-day, 
instead of being new, or the results of modern 
thought, are absolutely nothing but the gal- 
vanized ghosts of skeptical doctrines which 
were slain by the Christian fathers in the time 
of the Roman Empire, during the first three and 
a half centuries of the church. Some of these 
modern forms of unbelief, as for example, the 
deism of the seventeenth and eighteenth cen- 
turies in England, and which admits that there 
is a God but denies that he has anything to do 
with human affairs, is found distinctly stated, 
as we have seen, in Zephaniah's time, 630 years 
before Christ. That is not very new! It was 
thought that Hume's argument against miracles 
was new, but Samuel Johnson, referring to the 
subject said, "If I could have allowed myself 
to gratify my vanity at the expense of truth, 
what fame might I have aquired. Everything 
that Hume has written against Christianity had 



I48 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

passed through my mind long before he wrote." 
The whole field of unevangelical humani- 
tarianism in regard to the person of Christ, and 
of Agnoticism which rejected the Old Testa- 
ment, and talked about the "mistakes of Moses," 
as well as the Rationalism which denied both 
the need and the possibility of a supernatural 
revelation from God, was fought over in the 
early church, and the infidel arguments of both 
Jews and pagans put to silence. When the same 
ghostly arguments were resurrected after the 
Protestant Reformation, under the name of 
the Deism of Lord Herbert and later as Mate- 
rialism, they received a death-blow, a second 
time, from Butler and Paley on the one hand 
and Whitfield and Wesley on the other. The 
claim that the skepticism which is influencing 
young Christians to-day is the result of scien- 
tific progress, or is in any radical sense new, is 
simply a denial of history. The Rationalists 
and Materialists who are fighting the gospel 
to-day, are wielding the broken and cast-off 
weapons of defeated paganism. In the words 
of Bancroft, "Infidelity gains the victory when 
she wrestles with hypocrisy or with super- 
stition, but never when her antagonist is 
reason." 

A third element of the influence of Market 
Infidelity is its persistency and its confidence 
in reiteration after its logical basis is gone. The 



MARKET INFIDELITY. 1 49 

vast majority of people are not aware that these 
skeptical notions have ever been met and van- 
quished by Christian apologists in former ages. 
The Christian arguments have not been suf- 
ficiently popularized. The Market Skepticism 
sounds like something new in. each generation, 
and the constant parading of dead things in 
new dresses, and declaring that they are alive 
and modern, does affect many minds by the 
sheer sublimity of impudence and the momen- 
tum of ignorance. 

A fourth secret of this influence over Chris- 
tian minds, is its resort to ridicule and scorn, and 
the statement of half-truths, which can easily 
be made the butt of a jest. A man of wit may 
outrage history and talk nonsense day and 
night, but if he can raise a popular laugh at an 
opponent he gains a certain victory. Lucian, 
the great scoffer of antiquity, did substantially 
what scoffers are doing to-day. He said faith 
in Christ, whom he called the " Crucified Soph- 
ist," was "one of the absurd follies of the 
times." Any man who can use the weapon of 
irony or ridicule and can laugh heartily him- 
self, even when others see nothing indubitably 
funny, may be a very effective opponent of the 
gospel. A coarse laugh, raised by a jest aimed 
at the church or Bible, needs neither argument 
nor intelligence to produce an effect on young 
minds. Distortion of truth is always a very 



150 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

effective mode of intellectual warfare. You 
can disfigure the face of a friend beyond all 
recognition by a few crayon strokes judiciously 
distributed. In the same way a great truth may 
be disguised so as to appear both ugly and in- 
credible. This is the stock in trade of the great 
American caricaturist of Christian truth, the 
modern imitation of Lucian, in our own gener- 
ation. Mr. Nast distorting the face of a politi- 
cal opponent during a heated campaign, is 
modesty and accuracy itself, compared with the 
tongue of Mr. Ingersoll in disfiguring Christian 
truth. 

If we turn now from these influences which 
perpetually assail the Christian life, to some of 
the safeguards against them, it will be well in 
the first place to bear in mind that the effect 
which Market Infidelity produces is generally 
not a change of conviction which undermines 
faith, but only a discouraging impression 
which cools the ardor of activity and cuts the 
nerve of spiritual pluck and energy. As to 
the real grounds of faith, we need have no fear. 
Scientific or philosophical unbelief has too 
often changed its base and so revealed its weak- 
ness to cause any alarm. Defeated as pagan 
denial, it shifted its ground to more philosoph- 
ical Rationalism in the early church. Routed 
there, it changed its form after the Reforma- 
tion to Deism; from Deism in England, to 



MARKET INFIDELITY. I$I 

Atheism in France, and Pantheism in Ger- 
many; from Pantheism back to Materialism; 
from Materialism to revived Rationalism, and 
last of all, to Agnosticism, its latest form and 
largest concession. In each age it has repudi- 
ated the position of the preceding, and strug- 
gled for a new attitude or a new form, without 
altering the substance of the controversy. On 
the other hand, Christianity has steadily ad- 
vanced along the whole line, by unwaveringly 
holding the position with which it began, in 
the defense and reassertion of the Supernat- 
ural. This shifting of position on the one side, 
and steadfastness on the other, through the 
ages, on the one essential point of discussion, 
shows the weakness of skepticism and the 
invincibleness of the Christian faith in the 
arena of scholarly debate. While this is true, 
we need not be discouraged by the unbelief of 
the populace, whose only v/ant is that of a 
new heart. As we are not to judge of the 
healthfulness of a city by the atmosphere of 
its sewers, so neither are we to judge of the 
truth of a supernatural revelation by the rant- 
ing of the theater or the wrangle of the market 
place. 

It is well, also, to remember that just as 
Deism, both in Old Testament times and in 
the days of the English Restoration, arose from 
a decline of morals, so all practical infidelity 



152 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

springs from the same source: the "evil heart 
of unbelief," and the presence of an unspirit- 
ual state of mind. 

There is a third fact which no Christian can 
afford to overlook. The final resort in reassur- 
ing our hearts against the influence of practical 
skepticism, must be to what Christ is to us per- 
sonally. The supreme appeal is to experience; 
that is, to our own hearts. We must have con- 
victions of our own, born not simply out of 
books, or resting on the testimony of others, 
but born out of our personal experience with 
Christ. If you are conscious that Christ has 
emancipated you, comforted you, made a 
different man or woman of you, set you to lov- 
ing souls and denying self for others, and hun- 
gering and thirsting for righteousness, then you 
can laugh at and pity all the forms of Market 
Infidelity. But if this personal experience is 
lacking, then the shallowest skepticism of the 
street will overthrow you. To secure this for- 
tification within, let there be a noble, earnest 
struggle with your own heart. It may cost you 
the slaying of self, the sacrificing of old preju- 
dices which are very dear. Never mind. Go 
about it with a humble but profound purpose. 
The essential safeguard against all malign in- 
fluences which are aimed at Christianity must 
be what you are yourself as the result of God's 
love in Jesus Christ, 



MARKET INFIDELITY. 1 53 

Another prime safeguard to spiritual life is, 
in making our welfare offensive instead of de- 
fensive. The business of the Christian is not 
self-defense but attack. Our position, either as 
to faith or practice, must not be dictated by the 
word. No Christian soul succeeds on the Geo. 
B. McClelland policy. The market place is 
where we are to do our work. The chance 
which bad men get at our faith is precisely 
what gives us a chance at their infidelity. And 
" greater is he that is in you than he that is in 
the world." Go to your friends of Market Un- 
belief, directly, for purposes of conquest. To 
this end God has mercifully left you and the 
skeptic in daily contact with each other. Try 
to realize the omnipotence of a pure and holy 
life, the value of an aggressive faith, and of 
loving words and deeds, to these millions of 
the world's market place, on whom Christ had 
compassion, and who are really going to con- 
quer you unless you can save them. Try to get 
them in love with God, for they cannot stop in- 
juring your life till they stop hurting them- 
selves, and they cannot stop hurting either you 
or themselves till they stop wronging God. 
Bear in mind, too, that there never was a time 
in the world's history when Christians had so 
much reason to agree with Paul when he said, 
"I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ." 
There never was a day since the crucifixion of 



154 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

Christ when the gospel was so much master of 
the situation as it is to-day. There never was 
a time when Christian young men had so much 
reason for rejoicing in their faith, and so little 
reason for being ashamed of the Christian 
Church. There never was a time when so much 
profound scholarship was engaged in the de- 
fense and propagation of Christianity. There 
never was a time when the colleges of the 
country stood so solidly for Christian faith, or 
when so large a percentage of students were 
members of the Christian Church. More than 
fifty-five percentage of the thirty-four thousand 
college students of the United States are mem- 
bers of evangelical churches; and the per cent, 
is increasing every year. No doubt the churches 
are imperfect and living below the Savior's 
ideal; but it is safe to say, never since the days 
of Paul has there been so great an awakening 
among Christians as to their duty to the poor, 
as to the rooting out of the spirit of caste, as 
to the universal brotherhood of man, as to a 
more Christian political economy, as to the 
conversion of the heathen, and as to real sym- 
pathy with the needs and struggles and aspi- 
rations of young men, as there is to-day. In- 
deed, the peculiar characteristic of this gener- 
ation is the sympathy of the churches with the 
young. We cannot deny that there are reasons 
for some of the slurs of market skepticism in 



MARKET INFIDELITY. 1 55 

regard to church life. But this splendid awak- 
ening of the last few years to active co-opera- 
tion with Young Men's Christian Association 
work, with Christian Endeavor work, with all 
reasonable Christian socialism and with almost 
every high reform that fires the imagination 
and engages the energies o<£ young people, 
demonstrates both the purpose and fitness of 
the church to save mankind. It never was 
more efficient and was never more needed than 
to-day. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE MAJORITY. 

One of the wiliest beasts that Paul had to 
fight at Ephesus was the mighty force of num- 
bers, the sweep and momentum of public opin- 
ion. When he began his work in that city, 
there was there a little obscure band of Christians 
which might have been counted upon the 
fingers of your hands. The great, teeming, 
busy city was all against him. He had to face 
the historic prejudices of the half-savage, hun- 
gry, hirsute mob of the masses of the poor; he 
had to face the Pharisaic pride of the Jewish 
Colony; he had to face the more intelligent and 
more selfish followers of Demetrius, whose 
shrewd cry was, "Sirs, ye know that by this 
craft we have our wealth;" he had to face the 
contempt of the wealthy and luxurious, who 
set the fashions for Asia Minor, and controlled 
the public sentiment of the state; he had to 
face the abhorrence of the devout worshipers 
of Diana, and the derision of the philosophers, 
and the contempt of literary men. Added to 
all these was the city's pride of learning, its 
pride of culture, its pride of civilization, the 
influence of its hoary superstitions, its vast 

156 



THE MAJORITY. Itf 

history, its splendor of wealth, the awful mo- 
mentum of its corruptions, its lusts, and its life 
of pleasure, without hope and without God. 
All this added weight and solidity to the major- 
ity against Paul. Paul on the other hand was 
poor, obscure, alone — one man against the 
world. How easy to acquiesce in public senti- 
ment and to say, "The fight is a hopeless one/' 
But no, inspired by the spirit of the Nazarene, 
he resisted the majority and preached non- 
comformity, till his voice has been heard in 
every age and clime. The same battle has to 
be fought, in one form or another, by every 
Christian to-day. The Bible constantly re- 
minds us that the cause of Christ is in the 
minority still. A great part of the Christian war- 
fare consists in resisting the majority. The vast 
bulk of the wealth, the power, the numbers of 
the world, has been against spiritual life from 
the beginning. Numerically, Christ's followers 
still occupy but a small portion of the earth. 
Christians are everywhere reminded that, as 
the world goes, they belong to a small minor- 
ity; that they must make up their minds to 
face that fact when they identify themselves 
with Christ. They must expect, not only no 
sympathy from the outside world in their spirit- 
ual endeavors, but rather, in one form or 
another, active opposition. 

We are also reminded in a thousand different 



1 58 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ways that the force of numbers is a tremendous 
force to antagonize. Public sentiment is well- 
nigh resistless, not because it aims directly to 
destroy spiritual life, but because it aims only 
to secure conformity. Hence the subtle power 
of the multitude. For this reason the whole 
weight of the Word of God is thrown against 
conformity. We are to resist the world. We 
are forbidden to follow the multitude. We are 
to come out and be separate. We are to be 
transformed by the renewing of our minds, that 
we may prove (to the world itself) " what is 
that good and acceptable and perfect will of 
God." The spiritual conflict of life is always 
along the line of non-conformity. Power, vic- 
tory, salvation, lie along that line. The work- 
ing Christian has simply to make up his mind 
to join the minority and fling himself into the 
battle. Anyone who will analyze the influence 
of numbers especially on younger minds, will 
see that resistance is no child's play. 

1. There is a strange and subtle fascination 
about numbers, which tends to blind the mind 
to the sense of sin and danger. How much more 
natural and agreeable it seems to go in the way 
the multitude are going. How much more confi- 
dence one has in his own position, when he sees 
that he is one of a great company. Tell him 
he is on the wrong road, and his heart, if not 
his head, will reply, "It cannot be, I am not 



THE MAJORITY. 1 59 

alone. Here are the rich and the poor, the 
learned and the ignorant. Here is much of the 
best culture and learning of the ages. Here, 
too, are the young, the fair, the jubilant — all 
with me. It cannot be that this great busy, 
joyous company is going to thebad." Sin loses 
its ugly look when committed by a majority. 
Individual responsibility becomes lost in the 
sense of the crowd. A man in a mob, burning 
or killing his fellow man, never feels the same 
sense of guilt that he would if he undertook 
the deed alone. Nevertheless we read that, 
" though hand join in hand, the wicked shall 
not go unpunished." 

2. The force of numbers tends to exalt the 
idea of reputation above that of character. 
Conformity to the multitude seems all-impor- 
tant; to be singular looks like conceit or mad- 
ness. The popular, respectable thing is con- 
formity. It is this that makes moral reform so 
difficult and the progress of Christ's kingdom 
so slow. Throw yourself into any cause that is 
unpopular, and all the Beasts which Paul had 
to fight will come at you, each according to its 
nature — hissing, howling, barking, resisting all 
change, till your cause perchance happens to 
fight its way to popularity. Then they take it 
up and claim it as their own. 

3. The influence of the majority, from the 
nature of the case, is on the side of what is. 



l60 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

rather than what ought to be. The established 
order of things, especially if it be the growth 
of years, is regarded as sacred. Hence arises 
intolerance, persecution, the inquisition, the 
fagot and the stake. 

4. The influence of the multitude pressing 
constantly for conformity obscures the fact 
that in the highest concerns of existence the 
whole unconverted world is wrong. Hence the 
influence of the majority keeps our eyes blinded 
to the fundamental fact of the Gospel, that the 
world at large is against God, and hence that 
the moment Christ came into the world he had 
to begin a warfare of non-conformity. 

5. This indirect influence of the majority 
tends to enthrone fashion, which is only 
another name for conformity. It thus makes 
spiritual progress hard, up-hill work. The ten- 
dency of society is toward a common level. 
The majority destroys moral courage, makes 
men shrink from what the crowd calls "fanati- 
cism" or "ultraism." The result is, that the 
spirit of independent thought and self-denial is 
crushed. Take the socialistic reform of to-day. 
Thousands of us content ourselves too long 
with simply denouncing the restless agitation 
of the poor, without attempting to investigate 
or expose the causes of complaint. Take the 
temperance reform. Thirty years ago it was 
said, "The pinch of the temperance reforma- 






THE MAJORITY. l6l 

tion has not yet been decided. That pinch will 
come when we reach the question whether we 
will really exercise self-denial in order to crush 
the evil." The pinch in our own day is to 
come when Christian people, as such, are put 
to the test whether they will actually stand up 
and say, "God helping us, whether popular or 
unpopular, we will help defeat any man, to 
whatever party he may belong, who does not 
work openly for the destruction of the saloon, 
and we will help elect the best men, to what- 
ever party they belong, who are sincerely 
working against the saloon." When the church 
of Christ makes up its mind to do for the cause 
of temperance just what the liquor oligarchy is 
doing for the rum traffic — that is refuse to tie 
itself up to any organization under the sky — 
when it binds itself only to right men and right 
principles ratherthan to parties, and holds itself 
free to move from side to side and ready to cast 
the weight of its concentrated influence in favor 
of any movement which refuses to ally itself 
with the evil to be overthrown, then it will hold 
the balance of power in the nation as the liquor 
men hold it now. The church of Jesus Christ, 
with its ten millions of members, if good for 
anything, ought to hold the balance of power in 
this nation. 

6. Following the multitude leads to extrav- 
agance of living, to selfish waste of money, to 
11 



l62 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

secularism and materialism on the part of 
Christians; and that robs the church of its 
power to help the world. It blots out the dis- 
tinction between Christian and worldling. It 
puts all on practically the same level, just as 
did the wretched evil of the state church in 
early' New England, and as the state church 
is still doing on the Continent of Europe to- 
day. 

Now if there is anything with regard to 
which the Word of God is clear and imperative, 
it is that Christians, for their own sake, and for 
the sake of the world, must refuse to follow the 
multitude. The Bible is full of remarkable ex- 
amples, of both the right and the wrong kind, 
which bear upon this point. A pertinent one 
of the evil kind is given in the case of Aaron 
when he followed the lead of the majority and 
made the golden calf. Standing as a repre- 
sentative of God among men, he meanly 
yielded to the capricious sentiment of the multi- 
tude when he ought to have met it with a 
counter sentiment which belonged to, and was 
worthy of, all the ages. Head of the priest- 
hood as he was, he forsook God and yielded to 
the public sentiment of the hour, and then in 
his lame and miserable apology, laid the blame 
on the people. The effect on the man himself, 
on the multitude, on the cause of righteousness, 
was simply disastrous, A prompt rebuke, a 






THE MAJORITY. 163 

kindly and cogent argument, a little light given 
to the people from any heroic man of God 
would have averted that terrible sin of apostasy. 
Unaccountably soon, he and the people alike 
lost sight of their great spiritual mission and 
the cause of God was set back. 

How noble, how heroic, how promotive of all 
righteousness, was the conduct of Moses, the 
real man of God, when he came down from the 
mount and found what was done. Against his 
own brother, in the face of the multitude, in 
defiance of public opinion Moses said, " What 
did this people unto thee that thou hast brought 
this great sin upon them?" "Who is on the 
Lord's side. Let him come unto me. Draw 
your swords; consecrate yourselves to the Lord, 
every man upon his son and upon his brother; 
that the Lord may bestow a blessing upon you 
this day." "Oh, this people have sinned a great 
sin!" This was the heroic surgery that saved the 
Jewish church for the ages. It is a similar spirit 
that must save humanity to-day. 

Erasmus saw the needs of the church and the 
world as clearly as Luther, but he would not 
risk the personal discomfort and danger of 
unpopularity and persecution involved in op- 
posing the majority, and he threw away a sub- 
lime opportunity. Luther, of a different type, 
faced the multitude, went to the Diet at Worms, 
and made the Reformation. Pilate saw the 



164 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS 

innocence of Jesus and the injustice of his ene- 
mies as clearly as we do, but he could not face 
public opinion. Jesus was in the minority. He 
had a small, unpopular backing. Pilate had 
ends of his own to serve, and he gave Jesus to 
the mob. On the other hand, the wholi cf 
Christ's own gracious and divine life was one 
sublime refusal to follow the multitude. At first 
he stood alone without a friend or party. Then 
he cast in his lot with poor fishermen and publi- 
cans, and only a dozen of them at that, and 
stood against all the force of numbers, all the 
might of hoary customs, all the strength of 
traditions, all the pride of caste and culture, all 
the scorn, even of the rabble, though it led him 
to the cross. But he thereby purchased re- 
demption for the world. At the moral heat of 
that one holy life, all consecrated men and 
women, from that day to this, have kindled 
their heroic fires. Old and young, rich and 
poor, ignorant and learned alike, have risen up, 
one after another, through the years, in the 
strength of that example, and said, "I, too, can 
refuse to follow the multitude to do evil." And 
here alone lies the hope of man. 

In the strength of that principle, and inspired 
by that life Stephen faced the Sanhedrim, John 
faced Patmos, and Paul met Nero. In the light 
of that one Divine Example, God's martyr 
men and women stood firm and radiant when 



THE MAJORITY. l6$ 

the fires of the Roman Empire and of the later 
inquisition were kindled under their feet. They 
would not conform to majorities, for, like 
Stephen, they looked up and saw Jesus on the 
right hand of God. 

Oh, for such men to-day, especially young 
men, at the bar, in the editor's chair, in the 
store, in the workshop, in the pulpits of every 
city, and in the halls of legislation — to cham- 
pion the suffering cause of temperance, to 
plead for the working-man's Sabbath of rest, to 
herald a new political economy, to raise the 
standard of the church, to fight the Beast of 
Conformity to the World. 



CHAPTER XIV. 

THE YOUNG CHRISTIAN AND THE WEED. 

"But tobacco, tobacco — what a rude crowbar is that 
with which to pry into the delicate tissues of the 
brains — Emerson. 

But why discuss the tobacco question? Why 
attack the smoking habit, when, according to 
its advocates, it soothes and exhilarates, pro- 
motes sociability, is the solace of rich and poor 
alike, and is enjoyed by the greater part of the 
male population of the world? Is it not simply 
butting one's h:ad against the Chinese wall to 
oppose an evil, if it be an evil, from which the 
government draws an immense revenue, in 
which millions are invested, and which the 
practice of the minister, the lawyer, the doctor, 
the beggerman and the thief universally sus- 
tains? 

The main reasons for discussing the subject 
must appear as we proceed, but this much may 
be stated here. The importance of the theme 
calls for discussion. The universality of the use 
of tobacco, the ease with which it becomes a 
master and a tyrant; the mad avidity with which 
all classes, ages and ranks acquire tli2 habit, 
certainly indicates to thoughtful people that 

166 






THE WEED. 167 

tobacco has some remarkable influence on the 
human system. This of itself clothes the sub- 
ject with significance. Another reason is the 
tremendous rapidity of the spread of the habit 
in the nation and the world. Still another, is 
the right of self-protection for those who do 
not believe in its use, or enjoy its fumes. More- 
over, if there is even a well-grounded suspicion 
that the tobacco habit is hurtful to men, and 
hostile to the spread of the Gospel of Christ, 
that itself is sufficient reason for the agitation 
of the theme. 

It may seem to some like fanaticism to 
grapple with an evil based upon almost univer- 
sal custom and backed by such enormous 
money interests Indeed, it looks as if such an 
evil must have come to stay. But to the 
Christian the only thing that has really come 
to stay is the Kingdom of God; and if that 
stays, I, for one, believe that the tobacco habit 
must ultimately go. The hopelessness of the 
outlook may be only the result of unchristian 
timidity. "Truth has no greater foe than the 
distrust of some of its friends in its power." I 
think it is Dr. Lieber who, speaking of nations, 
says that some are above and others are below 
the lines of agitation of great subjects. The 
same is true of individuals. We were all below 
the line of the agitation of the temperance 
question, seventy-five years ago. Some people 



1 68 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

are below the line of religious doubt and unrest 
simply for want of mental and moral awaken- 
ing; others are above it, having grappled with 
their doubts and settled them. So, perhaps^ 
multitudes are below the line of agitation of the 
tobacco problem, but it will not be so forever. 
It cannot be denied that tobacco is a great 
leveler. It brings the churches and the slums, 
the preacher, the tramp, and the debauchee 
into the same fraternity, in this one particular 
at least. If, therefore, the churches cannot 
consistently criticize the slums in this matter, it 
may be worth while to agitate the subject and 
see why. 

THE GREAT BOON. 

Now the first thing that occurs to one look- 
ing at the enormous consumption of the weed, 
and the arguments of its defenders, is a feeling 
o.f pity for the poor, civilized world before it 
got this stupendous boon from the aboriginal 
savages of America. What a stupid affair 
Christian civilization must have been before 
1492! No pipes, no cigars, no snuff; nothing to 
put in the mouth but victuals and drink! What 
a miserable world socially; nothing to promote 
interesting conversation! What a fidgety world; 
nothing to calm the nerves! What commonplace 
thoughts; nothing to exhilarate the imagi- 
nation! What a humdrum life wives must have 



THE WEED. 169 

led, before they rose to the heroic dignity of 
enduring the stench of their smoking husbands 
breath, forty years, more or less, without com- 
plaint! What gloom must have hung over the 
life of every young man; not a whiff of smoke 
to mark the progress of his rising manhood! 
The world must have seemed a "fleeting show" 
even to the little boys! And then, what did the 
nations do without their tobacco revenue? All 
life would have been a burden if Christian 
people had not learned of the heathen how to 
live. To be sure the savages of San Domingo 
did not do everything for us. Indeed they were 
wofully behind the times. They inhaled the 
fumes of tobacco through the same aperture in 
the face in which they put their snuff, namely, 
the nose! It was given to the Latin and es- 
pecially the great Anglo-Saxon race to discover 
and apply the principle of taking the smoke 
into the mouth. Neither did we get the great 
principle of adulteration from the savages. 
That, too, is wholly a product of modern civili- 
zation. The poor heathen probably never 
thought of enriching their tobacco by the use 
of rhubarb leaves, dock, coltsfoot, beech, plan- 
tain, oak and elm, peat, earth, bran, sawdust, 
(they had no sawdust), malt, rootlets, meal of 
barley, oats, beans, pear, potatoes, starch and 
chickory leaves steeped in tar oil; all to make 
the business more profitable. 



170 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

CONCESSIONS. 

In entering upon any serious discussion of 
the subject, it is necessary first of all to make 
certain concessions. 

1. In dealing with the physical effects to 
tabacco, there has doubtless been much exag- 
geration on the part of some who have opposed 
its use. Indeed, there may have been some 
lies told on both sides. 

2. It must be conceded that some men have 
smoked through a long life and are not physic- 
ally dead yet. 

3. Many, even Christian people, habitually 
indulge this disgusting habit, and yet, cannot be 
charged with sin in the matter, because they 
have never given thought enough to the subject 
to put conscience on the alert. That is, their 
consciences are not as yet distinctively Chris- 
tian in regard to that subject. 

CAUSES OF RAPID SPREAD. 

The tremendous rapidity with which the 
tobacco habit has grown upon the world, is 
itself a serious problem. The following are per- 
haps some of the causes: 

1. The universal craving of nature for ex- 
hilaration, a craving which, if not kept under 
control of reason and conscience, crystallizes 
into a vice. 



THE WEED. 171 

2. The example of leading and influential 
men. Sir Walter Raleigh, who did much to 
make the custom popular in England, "took a 
pipe just before going to the scaffold." If he 
had gone to the scaffold just before taking the 
pipe, England would have more reason to be 
proud of him. 

3. The child instinct for imitation, whether of 
good or bad habits. 

4. The subserviency of all classes of people 
to fashion. 

5. The passion for money and the discovery 
that tobacco could become a profitable article 
of trade. This has led manufacturers and 
traders to create and cultivate for the sake of 
personal gain, an artificial demand. Thus every 
man engaged in the making or selling of 
tobacco becomes a tempter and corrupter of 
his fellow men. 

6. The State and National governments en- 
couraged the traffic in and consumption of 
tobacco, for the sake of revenue. And so it 
has become part of our civilization. "Thirteen 
European governments have made the trade a 
State monopoly." The native depravity of the 
heart, which ever tends to corrupt our nature 
and break its laws, is thus amazingly aided in 
its downward course by the passion for gain 
and the exigencies of trade. 

These and similiar considerations may ex- 



1^2 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

plain the universality of the vice in spite of all 
laws and penalties against it. 

LEGAL and MORAL EFFORTS FOR ITS RESTRICTION. 

Thoughtful people who have had the welfare 
of their fellow men at heart have always warned 
us against the danger of this evil. Medical 
and scientific testimony has accumulated against 
it in every generation for four hundred years, 
and still the habit has spread till rich and poor, 
old and young, ministers of Christ and servants 
of the devil are alike its slaves, and public sen- 
timent scarcely ventures to raise its voice in 
opposition. Queen Elizabeth prohibited the 
use of tobacco and declared the practice a 
"demoralizing vice, tending to reduce her sub- 
jects to the condition of savages, whose habits 
they imitated." King James both taxed and 
prohibited tobacco. In modern times, it is well 
known that efforts have been made to stop the 
use of tobacco in schools and colleges. This 
has been done in France, Germany and Switzer- 
land. Switzerland made a law in 1880 prohibit- 
ing the sale of tobacco to minors under fifteen 
years of age and making it an offense against the 
law for such to smoke. Even the Sultan of 
Morocco has prohibited the use of tobacco to 
his people, and has his prohibitory edicts read 
in all the mosques. The early laws of New 
England on this subject, though rigid In their 



THE WEED. I73 

prohibitions, indicate a low moral sense of evil, 
and yet they show that the C anger was per- 
ceived. 

In a certain provincial government of New 
England a lav/ was passed forbidding "any 
person under twenty-one years of age, or any 
other that hath not already accustomed himself 
to the use thereof, to take any tobacko until he 
hath brought a certificate under the hands of 
some who are approved for knowledge and skill 
in physick, that it is useful to him and also that 
he hath received a lycense from the courte for 
the same." Again "It is ordered that no man 
within this coloyne, after the publication hereof, 
shall take any tobacko publiquely in the streett, 
highwayes, oranybarneyardes, or uppon train- 
ing dayes, in any open places, under the pen- 
ality of six pence for each offence." 

In the early records of Harvard is a regula- 
tion that "No scholar shall take tobacco unless 
permitted by the president; with the consent 
of his parents, on good reasons first given by a 
physician, and then only in a sober and private 
manner." 

At a town meeting at Portsmouth, N. H., 
1662, it was "ordered that a cage be built, or 
some other means devised at the discretion of 
the select men, to punish such as take tobacco 
on the Lord's day, in time of publick service." 
Ten years later the town "voted that f any per- 



174 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

son shall smoke tobacco in the meeting-house 
during religious service, he shall pay a fine of 
five shillings, for the use of the town." 

The old Massachusetts Colony laws provided 
a penalty for those who should smoke tobacco 
"within twenty poles of any house or shall take 
tobacco at any inn or victualling house, except 
in a private room, so that neither the master 
nor the guests shall take offence thereat." 

In several states of the Union, in our own day, 
laws have been enacted prohibiting the sale of 
tobacco and cigars to minors. In our national 
schools, at West Point and Annapolis, it is well 
known that the weed has been repeatedly and 
at last successfully excluded, on both sanitary 
and moral grounds. The same is true of a 
number of Christian colleges in this country, 
notably of Oberlin; the American College- and 
Education Society declines to aid men who use 
tobacco. The noble work of the Woman's 
Christian Temperance Union in securing tem- 
perance education, including both stimulants 
and narcotics in our public schools, is ac- 
complishing much in the awakening of thought 
upon the subject and for the protection of the 
young. The legislature of Michigan after wide 
correspondence with educators and medical ex- 
perts has just passed a law prohibiting the 
manufacture, sale or giving away of cigarettes 
of any form in that state. These facts indicate 



THE WEED. I75 

to some extent the awakening of the conscience 
of the nation on this subject, but as yet it is 
only the fitful tossing of the hand of the slum- 
bering giant, who when fully awake, will surely 
rise and strike. 

INCREASE OF PRODUCTION AND USE. 

In spite of all these efforts for the restriction 
of the evil, it is enormously on the increase. 
From 1880 to 1888 there was an increase of 44 
per cent, in the number of cigars used in the 
United States, and nearly 400 per cent, increase 
in the number of cigarettes. Besides this, al- 
most two-fifths of the tobacco used in Europe 
is produced in this country. Professer Wallace 
of Michigan says: "The use of cigarettes has 
increased five-fold in the last three years." 
The tobacco bill in the United States, we are 
told by various writers, is larger than our bread 
bill. The whole cost of our National smoke is 
more that three hundred million dollars annu- 
ally, that is, over seven times more than is paid 
annually for all religious purposes. In 1880 it 
amounted to five dollars for each man, woman 
and child in the country. Or for smokers alone, 
an average of about thirty dollars apiece, annu- 
ally; which according to Dr. Sperry's calcula- 
tion, would amount at six per cent., in sixty 
years, to about $16,000 for each smoker. In 
1880, the annual production of tobacco was 



I76 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

462,000,000 pounds against 262,000,000 pounds, 
ten years before. In the city of New York 
alone, about 75,000,000 cigars are used annually 
at a cost of $9,000,000. With these facts in 
view, we are prepared to maintain the propo- 
sition that the tobacco habit as it is to-day is 
physically, socially, financially, mentally and 
morally a hurtful, dangerous, and degrading 
vice. 

I. Physically: — In discussing this point, it 
may be well, first of all, to notice the position of 
the one serious writer whom I have been able 
to find who defends the tobacco habit on what 
he claimed to be scientific grounds. Mr. John 
Fiske, M. A., 1869, took the position that 
"There is no physical pleasure in the long run, 
comparable with that which is afforded by 
tobacco." This is the key to his entire argu- 
ment, and his conclusion is, that "it does pay 
to smoke." Yet even this champion admits 
that tobacco is a poison and not a food; that 
if taken in sufficient quantity it destroys life, 
while in less quantity it will only sicken, but in 
sufficiently small quantity it does not harm. 
He also concedes that there are some people 
whom the smallest quantity will injure at once, 
and that it is always bad for children and youth. 
These admissions would seem to be sufficient to 
lead intelligent men to give the weed a wide 
berth. For it is certainly difficult to restrain 



THE WEED. I77 

children from that which their elders habitually 

practice; and the men are but rare who observe 

the safe rule of moderation when once the habit 

becomes the master. Mr. Fiske himself while 

taking a cold midnight drive, smoked eight or 

nine large 20-cent cigars and felt that he rather 

overdid the matter. He compares the use of 

tobacco with that of common salt, both of 

which are poisons and destructive to life if used 

to excess; therefore both must be used with 

temperance. His fallacy here lies in the simple 

fact that salt, as he himself admits, is essential 

to human life, while tobacco is not. The rule 

of temperance is to be applied to foods and 

medicines which are essential to life and health. 

From poisons which have absolutely no food 

value and are attended with dangers in every 

case, the law of nature suggests total abstinence. 

We may add in passing that if Mr. Fiske's 

argument that " there is no physical pleasure 

comparable to that from tobacco," is good at 

all, he must be a selfish and barbarous man who 

does not insist upon his wife and grown up 

children enjoying the same " incomparable 

pleasure." I do not understand Mr. Fiske to 

take this position. Indeed, there is nothing 

which reveals more clearly the selfish nature of 

the tobacco habit than the howl of derision that 

generally meets its indulgence by women. If 

it be a solace to weary heads and shattered 
12 



1 75 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

nerves, the wives, the mothers, the needle- 
women and the servant girls, who generally 
work thirteen hours a day, to the man's ten or 
twelve, have the first claim to this " incompar- 
able pleasure." 

Now it is a significant fact that nearly all the 
vast array of medical and scientific testimony 
against tobacco (only the smallest part of 
which I can here use), is in view of its physical 
effects. On this point I urge no opinion of my 
own, but simply the unassailable judgment of 
the latest science. An English medical jour- 
nal, the Scalpel, says: 

If there is a vice more prostrating to the 
mind and body, and more crippling to man's 
spiritual nature, we have yet to be convinced 
of it. 

The journal entitled Science, which is an au- 
thority among scientific men, made the follow- 
ing utterance about a year ago: 

Nicotine is one of the most powerful nerve 
poisons known. Its virulence is compared to 
to that of prusic acid. It destroys life, not by 
attacking a few, but all the functions essential 
to it, beginning with the center, the heart. A 
significant indication of this is that there is no 
substance known which can counteract its ef- 
fects. Its depressing action upon the heart is 
the most noticeable and noteworthy symptom 
of nicotine poisoning. The frequent existence 
of what is known as " smoker's heart" in men 
whose health is in no other respect disturbed, 
is due to this fact. 



THE WEED. I79 

The same journal gives the following as a re- 
sult of investigation by a Parisian Society 
against the use of tobacco: 

In an experimental observation of thirty-eight 
boys of all classes of society and of average 
health who had been using tobacco for periods 
ranging from two months to two years, twenty- 
seven showed severe injury to the constitution 
and insufficient growth; thirty-two showed the 
existence of irregularity of the heart's action, 
disordered stomachs, cough and craving for 
alcohol; thirteen had intermittency of the pulse, 
and one had consumption. After they had 
abandoned the use of tobacco, within six months' 
time one-half were free from all their former 
symptoms, and the remainder had recovered 
by the end of the year. 

This journal also presents the following as 
the effect of tobacco in the deterioration of na- 
tional or tribal life: 

When Europeans first visited New Zealand 
they found in the native Maoris the most finely 
developed and powerful men of any of the 
tribes inhabiting the islands of the Pacific. 
Since the introduction ot tobacco, for which 
the Maoris developed a passionate liking, they 
have, from this cause alone, it is said, become 
decimated in numbers and at the same time re- 
duced in stature and in physical well-being, so 
as to be an altogether inferior type of men. 

The Sanitarian for December, 1887, a maga- 
zine sustained by such men as Profs. C. R. Ag- 
new of New York, H. L. Bowditch of Massa- 
chusetts, T. J. Turner, Medical Director ot the 



l80 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

United States Navy, and a host of other lead- 
ing men, contains an article on " The Tobacco 
Poison," by George J. Zeigler, M. D., of Phila- 
delphia, which Dr. J. H. Jackson of Danville, 
N. Y., pronounces the " most scientific and ab- 
solutely unassailable argument against the use 
of tobacco" he has ever seen. In this article 
Dr. Zeigler says: 

Tobacco so effectually deadens and destroys 
vital excitability and the inherent contractibil- 
ity of the living tissues that it is not safe even 
as a drug. Tobacco poisons the blood both 
directly and indirectly and thereby effects 
injuriously every particle and part of the 
body. 

He says further, that " twenty young 
men competed at Westfield, Mass., for a West 
Point cadetship, and the examining surgeons 
had to reject ten of them on account of 4 to- 
bacco heart' brought on by cigarette smoking." 
The same writer also holds that through the 
law of heredity the children of smokers, brought 
up in its atmosphere in infancy, are both phys- 
ically and mentally injured by the influence of 
tobacco. He goes so far as to say that "even 
the unborn are deleteriously affected by it, as 
it often destroys them and causes premature 
birth; tobacco being a powerful abortifacient." 
" The slaughter of the innocents in tenement 
houses and other close places, is no doubt 
largely due to the poisonous action of tobacco." 



THE WEED. I8l 

Even Cope's Tobacco Plant, a journal of the trade 
says: 

Few things could be more pernicious to boys, 
growing youths, and persons of unformed con- 
stitution than the use of tobacco in any of its 
forms. 

The Medical and Surgical Reporter quotes the 
following from Dr. Willard Parker of New 
York: 

That tobacco is a poison is proved beyond 
question. It is now many years since my atten- 
tion was called to the insidious but positively 
destructive effects of tobacco on the human 
system. I have seen a great deal of its influ- 
ence on those who use it and work on it or in 
it. Cigar-makers, snuff-manufacturers, etc., 
have come under my care in hospitals and in 
private practice, and such persons never recover 
soon and in a healthy manner from any case of 
injury or fever. They are more apt to die in 
epidemics, more prone to apoplexy and paral- 
ysis. The same is true also of those who smoke 
or chew. 

Dr. Parker further says: 

I do not place my individual self in opposi- 
tion to tobacco, but science in the form of physi- 
ology and hygiene is opposed to it, and science 
is the expression of God's will in the govern- 
ment of his work in the universe. 

Dr. James H. Jackson, says: "I believe to- 
bacco is sapping the moral and physical foun- 
dations of the race, more even than alcohol." 
Prof. VV. S. Sperry of Ann Arbor, speaking of 
cigarette smoking, says: 



1 82 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

It lowers vitality, it lessens bodily vigor, it 
unfits the victim for concentrated effort, it is 
always associated with a low degree of morals 
and is generally with the practice of other 
vices. 

It was in view of such facts as these, 
gathered from a wide range of correspondence, 
that the committee before the Michigan Legis- 
lature the other day urged the conclusion that 
the increase of the habit was " alarming and 
that the time had come for radical legislation." 

Now, for any man to defend the habit, in 
either old or young, in the face of this testi- 
mony of the latest scientific research, which 
might be quoted to the extent of a volume, is 
surely the blindest and most reckless infatua- 
tion; and to practice the habit without being 
able to defend it is an inconsistency unworthy 
of a man. It seems well nigh useless to enact 
laws to guard the young against this evil, for 
there is in these days no protection to anybody 
from the fumes of tobacco, especially in our 
cities, and one of the worst signs of the times 
is that non-smokers seem willing to tamely ac- 
quiesce in the injury offered to their health and 
the insult to the rights of their humanity. 

II. Socially. The claim that the use of to- 
bacco promotes sociability is the falsest and 
absurdest of its claims. It is equivalent to 
saying that the absence of cleanliness of person 
and sweetness of breath, the absence of pure air. 



THE WEED. I83 

the absence of women and children, the ab- 
sence of bodily health, and of minds acting in 
the normal condition in which God made them, 
together with the presence of bad company 
and an utter disregard of the rights of others, 
are essential to sociability. Such a claim is a 
slander alike on human and divine nature. The 
fact is, for any man to smell strongly, is an of- 
fense against society, be he negro or fine gen- 
tleman, and the gentleman smoker considers it 
so himself, if the smell be of onions, or garlic, 
or cabbage, or even perfumery; but by the pro- 
cess of tobacco-blinding, he sees no offense in 
his being saturated with his own favorite smell. 
III. The financial aspect of the question is 
not simply the vast amount of money wasted 
in the aggregate, though that indeed is appall- 
ing. A billion of dollars squandered every year 
in smoke! America, with its millions of poor, 
wasting more than a third of that sum! But 
the financial evil lies mostly where it cannot be 
expressed in statistics. God only knows how 
many poor women who already drudge like 
beasts of burden have to increase their toils 
and discomforts in order that their husbands 
may enjoy this unsocial and debasing luxury. 
God only knows how many poor children go 
poorly clad and fed and educated, because 
their fathers insist upon selfishly dividing their 
scanty earning between their children and their 



154 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

pipes. God only knows how many honest 
debts stand unpaid because tobacco has to be 
bought. God only knows how many young 
men are made thieves and defaulters by this 
selfish indulgence which is so expressive that 
neither their income nor their moral manhood 
can bear the stain. 

There is no mystery about hard times for the 
poor. Nothing strange about boys falling into 
bad company under this system of enormous 
and wilful waste. In the financial question 
there is always a moral element. With Chris- 
tian people especially, it can never be a ques- 
tion of mere personal pleasure, as to what a 
man shall do with his money. The human 
family as a whole has a claim upon him. It is 
not simply the poor children of smokers who 
suffer from his indulgence, it is also country, 
humanity, and " the world lying in wicked- 
ness." When every Christian and benevolent 
cause is suffering for money to extend the 
kingdom of God, it betrays a criminal ignor- 
ance of, or else a criminal indifference to, the 
cause of Christ, for Christian men, whether 
rich or poor, to waste on their own artificial 
appetites that which would equip all the agen- 
cies for the evangelization of the world. 

Granting that it is a real pleasure to a smoker 
to indulge this habit, that of itself can be a de- 
cisive argument for no thoughtful man, There 



THE WEED. 185 

are surely moral considerations which must 
have weight. It may be a pleasure and yet a 
low one. It may be a high duty to give up a 
low pleasure because it is offensive to wife and 
friends, dangerous to children and injurious to 
health; and even if these considerations were 
removed, duty might require it to be given up 
because it cheats the family out of some neces- 
sary good. Or again, if this argument had 
no weight, the pleasure might still be wrong, be- 
cause it prevents a man from being able to give 
the Gospel of Christ to the rest of the world. 

The rich man may say that his cigars do not 
pinch his children or prevent him from giving 
to the Lord's cause; and at any rate that which 
he smokes is his own. But under our Lord's 
idea of stewardship I do not find that very 
much of a man's money really is his own. And 
if it were, that would not settle the question, 
for it is not true that every man has a right to 
do as he likes with his own. "He has only a 
right to do as he ought with his own." Nor do 
I see that a steward who has much entrusted 
to him, has any more right to consume a part 
of it upon his lusts than one who has but little. 
There are luxuries which may seem quite justi- 
fiable even to the Christian, but when humanity 
is in direful need, this waste through a hurtful 
habit is essentially selfish, and therefore abso- 
lutely unchristian. 



1 86 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

IV. Mentally. It hardly needs to be said 
that a physical evil is also a mental one. The 
body and mind are so closely related that what- 
ever injures one is hurtful to the other. Ac- 
cordingly, medical and scientific men affirm 
that the use of tobacco impairs the memory and 
weakens the power of concentrating thought. 
An English surgeon says that the smokers and 
chewers, as a rule, are lacking in the fortitude 
necessary to undergo the surgical operations. 
The excessive use of this poison also produces 
insanity. In the General Hospital of Massa- 
chusetts, some years ago, eight cases of insan- 
ity were ascribed to the use of tobacco. The 
opposition of educators to the habit is always 
based, in part at least, upon its deadening ef- 
fects on the mind. One point of which the 
testimony recently presented to the Michigan 
Legislature was "uniform," was that the cigar- 
ette habit deadens the mental faculties. Dr. 
Hammond of New York says that under the 
influence of tobacco, "the action of the brain is 
impaired. The ability to think, and in fact all 
mental concentration, is weakened." It is said 
that no tobacco user ever graduated at the head 
of his class in Harvard University. The same 
is doubtless true in other institutions. Dr. L. 
B. Sperry, after giving statistics of tobacco 
using and scholarship at Yale, says, "These 
facts certainly justify one or two inferences, 



THE WEED. I87 

either that the use of tobacco results as a rule 
in mental deterioration and inferior scholarship, 
or that deteriorated and inferior minds are the 
ones that as a rule most readily contract the 
custom of using the filthy narcotic." The 
champion of the weed can take which horn of 
the dilemma he pleases. 

V. Morally. The investigation of experts 
agrees perfectly with the observation of men in 
general as to the moral effects of tobacco. 
"Worst of all," says Dr. Zeigler of Philadelphia, 
"it debases the moral as well as the mental and 
physical nature; perverts the conscience, in- 
duces laziness, selfishness, deceitfulness, cruelty 
and sensuality." Ruskin charges that it "de- 
moralizes youth, as enabling them to pass their 
time happily in idleness." Dr. Howell of Lan- 
sing, Mich., says, "It destroys the moral sensi- 
bility, and leads to other vices." A close ob- 
servation, by any thoughtful person, will con- 
vince him that the use of tobacco dulls the 
moral sense as to the rights and comforts of 
other people. It creates an unnatural appetite 
and thus becomes the stepping stone to in- 
temperance. The man who loses his self-con- 
trol in one respect is less his own master in 
everything. It is beyond dispute that the 
habit breaks the moral power of the will. 
There is no slavery more relentless, nor chain 
harder to break. Even the appetite of the 



1 88 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

drunkard is more easily overcome. I have a 
friend who daily deplores this bondage into 
which he has fallen, but lacking the moral 
power to throw away his pipe, has often in 
desperation put his tobacco into the hands of 
his wife. After a few days of abstinence he 
becomes so restless, so woebegone, so ill, so 
almost inhuman that the poor wife, who by this 
selfish arrangement is made to bear all the 
strain, relents, and returns the pipe to her 
husband, who is still a slave to the habit. An- 
other friend says it would deliberately kill him 
to give up his tobacco. General Grant broke 
the habit of drink, and admitting that tobacco 
injured him, promised a friend to give it up; 
but even his iron will was too much crippled, 
and he died at last the victim of the cigar. 
This is a slavery which its own victims nearly 
all deplore. Fathers while setting the bad 
example warn their children against it. The 
father who should train his son to smoke or 
chew would be considered a monster, and yet 
every parent who indulges in the habit is 
indirectly guilty of that sin. Let him preach 
as he may, his example is tenfold more power- 
ful than his precept. 

L. B. Sperry, M. D., lecturing recently before 
the students of Oberlin College on the subject 
of tobacco, concluded his address with the fol- 
lowing arraignment of the weed, I cannot do 



THE WEED. 189 

better at this point of the argument than to 
quote his words. He says: "In the court of 
scientific appeal and of Christian equity I find 
registered eight indictments against tobacco: 

i. It impoverishes and exhausts the soil 
upon which it is raised more than any other 
crop that we cultivate. 

2. Its use is expensive to all who indulge in 
it; actually impoverishing many and often 
depriving their families of the comforts and 
even of the necessaries of life. 

3. Its use in any form or place is a filthy 
practice on the part of its devotees, and its use 
in public is an offense and many times even an 
insult to those who do not use it. 

4. It is physically unhealthy, not only to 
those who use it, but to those who by associa- 
tion are subjected to its influences. 

5. It injures the mental power and balance 
of its victim, dulling and deteriorating the in- 
tellect, the emotions and the will. 

6. It demoralizes and despiritualizesto some 
extent all who use it in any form. 

7. Its general public use blunts the public 
moral sense, degrading not only the individual 
habitue, but also society at large. 

8. Its degenerating effects, physical, mental, 
moral and spiritual, through the forces of hered- 
ity, are increasingly felt by succeeding genera- 
tions. Its use tends to destroy the race. 



190 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

Tobacco, like all other narcotics as used by 
the masses, is a blight and a curse, the devil's 
pet agency, at once an enchantment and a 
scourge. It is really useful only for killing 
pestiferous insects." 

CONCLUSION. 

What then is to be done? What can Chris- 
tian philanthropy do about it? 

i. Agitate. Cease to quietly acquiesce and 
begin everywhere to discuss the evil, so that it 
shall be forever after impossible for good men 
to fall into this bondage ignorantly. This is 
God's method in all moral reforms. Throw 
light on the nature and tendencies of the habit. 
Apply the Gospel of Christ. While conceding 
that the habit may not be a sin to those who 
don't know any better, it is safe to say that it 
may be a sin for Christian people not to think 
about it and get all the light they can. The 
thoughtless adoption of any habit by a whole 
people is no proof that it is right or safe. Lit- 
tle or nothing can be accomplished as yet by 
law. The moral sense must be awakened. Our 
stronghold is to stand by the laws of nature and 
the laws of God. Women must make their in- 
fluence felt in this matter. If they do not be- 
lieve in tobacco at all, they ought to say so 
with an emphasis. When young ladies fully 
commit themselves against any social and de- 



THE WEED. I9I 

grading custom, especially among young men, 
that custom will begin to disappear. We hear 
much in these days about woman's rights, and 
I believe in woman's rights. She certainly has 
the right, among many other things, to noble 
companionship and pure air, and it would be a 
very encouraging sign to see her assert it. But 
when we see a woman willing to train her child- 
ren in the blue atmosphere of tobacco smoke 
without a protest, or when we see a young lady 
walking or riding with a young man who wears 
a pipe or a cigar in his teeth, and that young 
lady is willing to swallow the vile fumes that 
come from his mouth, simply for the infinitesi- 
mal privilege of his company, I say, there is a 
woman, there is a girl, who does not believe in 
woman's rights. She may believe in voting, 
very likely she does, but she cares little or noth- 
ing for woman's rights or woman's duties 
either. 

2. The holy principles of the Gospel which 
aim to free men from all forms of bondage can 
never be fully applied to human life when this 
habit prevails. The kingdom of God cannot 
fully come, till this goes. It is well known that 
the moral instinct of every man makes the de- 
filer of the temple a criminal; and that instinct 
is but the shadow of God's appreciation of holi- 
ness. The temple is sacred. Now the apostle, 
by a noble figure of speech, transfers the idea 



192 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

of the temple to the regenerate soul. " Ye are 
the temple of God and the spirit of God dwell- 
eth in you. What, know ye not that your bod- 
ies are the temple of the Holy Ghost?" The 
renewed mind is the work of the Holy Spirit. 
It is the seat of the operations of the Spirit on 
the earth. It is dear to God. 

Now I do not hesitate to plant myself on 
this proposition, that the tobacco habit in its 
physical, mental, and moral influence is a de- 
filement of the temple of the Holy Ghost, and 
therefore that the Christian church must take 
its stand, not by ecclesiastical laws, but by 
moral influence against this vice; not only the 
vice of using the narcotic, but also the evil of 
making and selling it. The Christian church 
must set a pure example. It must clear its own 
skirts or lose the respect of mankind. The 
Christian man who either uses, makes, or sells 
tobacco, is putting a temptation before the face 
of his own and his neighbor's boys, which is well 
nigh irresistible. He is especially guilty who 
creates and pampers unnatural demands in the 
community, for personal gain; just as does the 
proprietor of the saloon, with the difference 
that the tobacco store is not quite so danger- 
ous to the peace as the saloon. 

3. The reform must naturally touch first of 
all the Christian ministry. Not because the 
indulgence is inherently worse in ministers 



THE WEED. I93 

than in other Christians, but because in them 
the inconsistency is more glaring and makes a 
more public scandal, and so acts more directly 
against the Gospel. I rejoice to learn that the 
Methodist denomination are beginning to re- 
fuse license to preach to candidates who use 
the drug. Smoking preachers and theological 
seminaries have dishonored the Christian call- 
ing long enough. No man who cannot or will 
not practice self-denial in regard to this enslav- 
ing habit, is fit to preach the duties of self-denial 
on this subject to other people. A Chicago 
writer in the Pacific Health Journal tells of a 
woman who would not call the minister of her 
church to her death bed, because "every time 
during her illness that he had entered the room 
to bring the consolations of the blessed Gospel 
of love, peace and purity, there came also with 
him the strong and unmistakable fumes of to- 
bacco. To whisper into her dying ear the words 
of Jesus the Savior on the breath of tobacco 
was more than the dying saint could com- 
placently bear." How can a minister of Christ 
respect either his manhood or his ministry if 
he advises the boys of his congregation to avoid 
the bitter bondage of the cigar, and then goes 
into his back yard or the foul stable of the rail- 
way train and gives the lie to his advice. The 
old Scotch woman who objected to a minister's 
wearing a mustache because she "didna like to 

13 



194 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

hear the word o' God come whizzin through 
hairs," may have been over-fastidious, but it 19 
a dictate of clean, religious sentiment to object 
to hearing the "word o' God come whizzin 
through" lips tainted with the evidence of a 
filthy self-indulgence. 

Aside, however, from the greater publicity of 
the minister's example, the demand is just as 
imperative that the Christian layman should 
abandon the habit as the Christian minister. 
We agree entirely with Professor Phelps that 
"The distinction is not a wise one which forbids 
it to clergymen more imperatively than to lay- 
men." That is not a healthy type of religious 
faith which lays the clergy under prohibitions 
which are not thought necessary in regulating 
the conduct of other men. " Tobacco," says 
the Professor, " is neither for food nor drink, 
and so far as I know it is not medicine except 
to a sick sheep. An immense and increasing 
number of Christian believers condemn the 
habit as being unsympathetic with the imitation 
of Christ. The drift of the noblest and purest 
civilization is palpably adverse to a usage which 
so distinctly subordinates mind to matter, soul 
to body." 

4. We must proceed on the supposition that 
to the Christian especially, the abandonment 
of the habit is possible. The shrinking from 
the self-denial involved in reform is a piece of 



THE WEED. I95 

cowardice unworthy a Christian soul. Fichte 
says, "A man can do what he ought to do, and 
when he says he cannot, he will not." It is idle 
for men in ordinary health of body and mind 
to say they cannot give up tobacco or that the 
deprivation would kill them. In many of our 
penitentiaries tobacco is not allowed to smok- 
ers, and after fifteen or twenty days they are all 
right, appetite returns and health is better. 
Reformation will seldom if ever come by mod- 
eration. It comes by total abstinence. The 
prayer offered by an earnest New England 
deacon was just the prayer for tobacco users, 
" O Lord give us grace to know thy will and 
grit to do it." 

Instead then of crippling our wills, instead of 
defiling this mysterious temple of the Spirit of 
God, let us stand in awe of it; let us purify and 
adorn it with the beauty of holiness. All spir- 
itual agencies, all books, all churches, all social 
and moral reforms, are but the scaffolding to 
build this temple for the indwelling of God. 
These shall pass away, but it must stand forever. 
Let us rebuild, if the temple has fallen into 
ruin, as did the rebuilders of the ancient temple, 
who stood in the midst of mocking tempters, 
working with one hand while holding the 
weapon of defense in the other, and toiling 
"from the rising of the sun, till the stars ap- 
peared," 



CHAPTER XV. 

CONCLUSION. 



CHRIST S APPEAL TO THE HEROIC ELEMENT IN 
YOUNG PEOPLE. 

The series of articles which closes with this 
number, began with this proposition: that 
"the secret of Christian victory is not repres- 
sion, but inspiration. We kill the devil by awak- 
ing the angel in the heart." We are not to fight 
the good fight of faith on the low plane of the 
defensive, but are to go out and conquer by an 
aggressive campaign. Our aim in calling at- 
tention to the topics we have been discussing 
has not been simply to point out perils to the 
Christian life, but, while recognizing their real- 
ity, to indicate the source of inspiration and 
the motives which naturally appeal to all that 
is best in the hearts of young people. It is 
fitting, therefore, that we should close with the 
topic indicated above. We have talked much 
about Paul. Let us now turn to Christ. Our 
Lord pointed out both the perils and the en- 
couragements of the Christian life in a single 
sentence: "In the world ye shall have tribula- 
tion; but be of good cheer, I have overcome 

196 



CONCLUSION. I97 

the world." It is worthy of notice that "tribula- 
tion" does not mean simply the ordinary dis- 
appointments and sorrows of human life. The 
meaning of the Greek word is that of pressure 
or hindrance, the condition of one in a "tight 
place." Our English word "tribulation," comes 
through the Latin from the word "tribuliim" a 
threshing machine, consisting'of a wooden frame 
studded with sharp iron teeth. To be in trib- 
ulation is to be under the "tribulum." In both 
cases it means opposition, the pressure of the 
world spirit upon the Christian life. But we 
are not to speak now of the opposition, but of 
the Redeemer's "good cheer." From behind 
the shadow the still, small Voice is always 
sounding, full of hope and strength to the 
weariest of us all, "Be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world!" 

What Christ brought into the world was not 
merely a new evidence of the world's guilt and 
need, but a divine hope. He saw the worst 
that the world contained, and yet he said, "Be 
of good cheer." Hope is power. Discourage- 
ment is paralysis. A false optimism and a false 
pessimism are both to be shunned. The one 
defeats Christ's divine purpose by a blind and 
selfish indifference to man's need of redemption; 
the other by an equally blind and selfish doubt 
as to God's remedy. It is looking too exclu- 
sively on the dark side, and overlooking Christ's 



I90 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

ground of "good cheer" that embitters so many 
reforms. The true Christian cannot be a pessi- 
mist or a cynic. The hopeless task is not laid 
on him of discovering a remedy for the woes of 
earth. His task is simple. He has only to 
apply the infallible remedy he has. It is not 
the mere analysis and exposure of the nature 
of sin after the manner of the moral philosopher 
that he is chiefly concerned with. It is rather 
to look on society with a Christ-inspired confi- 
dence in these three divine forces of this uni- 
verse: Faith, Hope and Love, and so to be 
ready to suffer for society rather than to up- 
braid it. The gospel is not now a mere experi- 
ment. The world believes in its power. It is 
a cheering sign of the times that what wicked 
men are really, though unwittingly, crying for 
is Christ's Golden Rule, and that what philan- 
thropists are aiming now to secure is simply to 
Christianize wealth, and laws and theories of 
Political Economy. Therefore, "Be of good 
cheer." 

Now it is quite evident that whatever pur- 
poses to insure to us victory over self and the 
world must be something which will appeal to 
the highest and weightiest forces of our nature, 
something worthy to awaken, inspire, employ 
the sum total of our moral manhood, in one 
sublime, heroic endeavor. This is found and 
found only in the religion of Christ. I ask you 



CONCLUSION. I99 

then, to consider Christ's appeal to the heroic 
element in every man. What does our Lord's 
call to a Christian life mean? If it were merely 
a call to repression, if it were only a doctrine 
of doubt or of "don't," if it were only to protect 
yourselves, it must inevitable fail. But it 
means infinitely more than that. As a young 
man standing among young men, Christ calls 
them to walk in his luminous steps, with all 
that those steps involved, with the divine sug- 
gestion to be of good cheer. 

The first thing, then, is to get rid of the low^ 
mean, dishonoring view of Christ that his 
religion is weak and unmanly. Jesus is the 
hero of the ages, and his call, when understood, 
touches and thrills all that is noblest in every 
man. Any man who says Christ's call does 
not inspire him either does not understand 
it, or he confesses that he is on a low 
and hopeless plane of moral manhood. The 
call to be a Christian is a call to self-control. 
Is self-control a sign of weakness? No. It is 
the one source of real power. " He that hath 
no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is 
broken down and without walls." Such a city 
lies there in a hostile country, open to the in- 
cursions of every arm that passes through the 
land, the camping ground of every Bedouin 
tribe, the lair and the prey of every wild beast. 
What a picture of feebleness! What a descrip- 



200 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

tion of some young men in society to-day! 
On the other hand, " He that ruleth his own 
spirit is greater than he that taketh a city." 
The grandest sight society has to offer is that 
of a young Christian standing among all the 
allurements of earth, denying himself because 
he loves and is loyal to Christ. Now I say, if 
there is any principle in man that responds to 
a call which involves the hardship of self-gov- 
ernment, if there is a chord in the human 
bosom that vibrates under the touch of a noble 
aim and a great purpose, Christ's call appeals 
to that. 

Again, is not every true man thrilled and 
fascinated by a sublime example of self-sacri- 
fice for others? That is the second ground of 
Christ's appeal to the heroism of young men. 
What is it that thrills and awes the soul as 
we read the story of Gethsemane? Is it the 
divine man's self-surrender to the divine will, 
and to the necessities of a divine mission of 
love. It is the voluntary qualifying of himself 
for an aggressive movement to save, not him- 
self, but mankind. And the noblest specimens 
of heroic life the world knows anything about, 
have been the result of that spirit caught from 
Christ, in the hearts of young men. Christ's 
call, then, is no call to a petty profession, to a 
soft-handed church membership. Weakness? 
Was that a sign of weakness, when, according 



CONCLUSION. 201 

to Canon Farrar, in the presence of 80,000 
spectators assembled to see the gladiators 
fight, a Christian young man leaped irito the 
arena and cried, " Ye shall not fight! " He 
knew what the act involved. He is hissed 
down. The gladiators pierce him with their 
swords. His body is kicked aside. The games 
go on and the people shout applause. " Yes," 
says the historian, "they go on; but for the 
last time. By that act of heroism men's eyes 
were opened; and because one poor young man 
had Christian courage, one more habitual 
crime was wiped from the annals of the world." 
Christian self-sacrifice for a great cause, com- 
bined with self-restraint, is " the highest form 
of self-assertion," the very essence of manli- 
ness. Are young men and women open to the 
touch of the sublime and heroic? Then Christ 
must win them. 

But it is said we are not called to such high 
deeds in these days. I reply, it may take as 
lofty a type of heroism persistently to resist the 
insinuations of worldliness in the church to-day 
and loyally to represent Christ, as it did to meet 
Paul's mob at Jerusalem or that young man's 
mob in Rome. Besides, to make a voluntary 
self-sacrifice, even for a matter of very subordi- 
nate importance, is always ennobling. No one 
appreciates that more than young men. The 
athlete endures hardness, refrains from dissi- 



202 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

pation, adopts frugal habits, gives up his wine 
and cigar, and in every way keeps his " body 
under," that he may overcome in a temporary 
physical contest, and that is ennobling. It fires 
his imagination. He is more of a man every 
way for the discipline. How much grander the 
appeal when a similar self-denial is demanded 
for the redemption of man. To respond to 
Christ's call is to make a double alliance, first 
with the Divine Person, second with a divine 
cause. The Divine Person calls us to his side 
and bids us take up the divine cause, with the 
great words, " Be of good cheer, I have over- 
come." He says: "The cause I ask you to 
assume is one which will keep you abreast of 
all progress, because it is a movement which 
arrays itself against all wrong. It will furnish 
you with endless stimulus to loftiest endeavor. 
It will save you while saving the world. But it 
will engage every fiber of your being. He that 
would save his life shall lose it. If you are 
worthy, come up to me and conquer. To 
struggle nobly, to conquer self, to help the 
needy, to bind up broken hearts, to open blind 
eyes, to rescue the fallen, even if you should 
struggle in vain, would be a mighty inspiration 
to all true men; but this is no vain attempt, no 
losing game. It is as sure as the Father's 
throne. I ask you to throw your consecrated 
manhood into this cause and to stand with me, 



CONCLUSION. 203 

confident of the result. "In the world ye shall 
have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I have 
overcome the world." 

Who will say that is not divinely alluring to 
the generous, heroic spirit of young men and 
women? It is not the Christian but the world- 
ling or the shirk who becomes a "milksop." 
We are not called to remain weaklings, like a 
city broken down and without walls. We are 
called to become a robust spiritual force, to rise 
up and face a grand future. Not manly to be 
a Christian? Paul was a Christian when he 
said, " None of these things move me." Ste- 
phen was a Christian when under the shower of 
stones he looked up and saw Jesus on the right 
hand of God, and cried: "Lord, lay not this 
sin to their charge." Martin Luther was a 
Christian. Chinese Gordon was a Christian. 
Elijah P. Lovejoy was a Christian. Howard, 
standing at sundown on Cemetery Hill with 
his empty sleeve pinned to his shoulder in front 
of the " Louisiana Tigers," was a Christian. 
John Brown was a Christian. " You are a game 
man, Captain Brown," said the Southern sheriff, 
while in the wagon going to the place of exe- 
cution. "Yes," said Brown, " I was brought up 
so. It was one of my mother's lessons," and 
then walked cheerfully to the scaffold, thank- 
ful to be allowed to die for a great cause. To a 
friend who said to him: "If you can only be 



204 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

true to yourself to the very end, how glad we 
shall all be," he answered: " I cannot say, but 
I do not think that I shall deny my Lord and 
Master, Jesus Christ." But why do I talk to 
you of these? Look at Jesus himself. See the 
way He overcame. Think of the contrast be- 
tween him and the spirit of the times in which 
He lived ! Look at the great world with its grand 
antiquity, its hoary traditions, its magnificent 
institutions, its captivating rituals, its system- 
atized doctrines, its proud philosophies, its 
splendor of learning and littleness, its tyranny 
of culture and fashion, its royalty of emptiness 
and show; and then see the despised Nazarine, 
with only a dozen penniless fishermen at his 
back! There they are, a poor handful; but 
wielding the thunderbolts of God! There they 
are, braced against the world spirit of the ages 
like the cliffs of Katahdin against the oncom- 
ing sea. They are leagued with God and stand- 
ing for truth and for man, and thus they over- 
come. 

Now what I urge is this, that no young man 
or woman is ever called of Christ to anything 
less or lower than that. Wherever we stand in 
the scale of moral being, Christ's call touches 
us at our highest point and says, "Come up 
higher." "These things have I spoken that in 
me ye might have peace. In the world ye 
shall have tribulation, but be of good cheer, I 



CONCLUSION. 205 

have overcome the world." I do not think 
that young men will ever come to Christ in 
great numbers till they get this exalted view of 
the Christian life; but when they do get that, I 
believe they must and will respond. 

And now, Christian readers, farewell. This 
great, inspiring life of Jesus Christ is the life 
to which you are to allure and win the men and 
women about you. Do not belittle it. Do not 
be ashamed of it. Do not exhibit merely its 
depressing side. Show it as it is in Jesus. 

Take up His banner and bear it onward. Do 
not trail it in the dust. It is the symbol of vic- 
tory. It may cost you something now to take 
it up, but the day is coming when to have 
spoken for Christ, to have toiled and suffered 
and borne witness in His cause, will be your 
crown of glory. The fact that can never be 
blotted out of your history, is that you tieed 
Christ and that Christ needs you. "Now the God 
of hope fill you with all joy and peace in be- 
lieving that ye may abound in hope, through 
the power of the Holy Ghost." The best thing 
that I could wish for myself and for you, would 
be that we might all be able to say of ourselves 
in our heart of hearts what the poet has repre- 
sented Paul as saying of himself: 

"Christ! I am Christ's ; and let the name suffice you, 
Aye, for me too, he greatly hath sufficed. 

So, with no winning words I would entice you, 
Paul has no honor and no friend but Christ. 



206 THE BEASTS OF EPHESUS. 

"Yes, without cheer of sister or of daughter, 

Yes, without stay of father or of son, 
Lone on the land and homeless on the water, 

Pass I, in patience, till the work be done. 

"Yet not in solitude, if Christ a-nearme 
Waketh him workers for the great employ, 

Oh, not in solitude if souls that hear me 
Catch from my joyance the surprise of joy. 

"Therefore, O Lord, I will not fail or falter, 

Nay, but I ask it, nay, but I desire ; 
Lay on my Tips the embers of the altar, 

Seal with the sting and furnish with the fire. 

"Quick, in a moment, infinite forever, 

Send an arousal better than I pray, 
Give me a grace upon the faint endeavor, 

Souls for my hire, and Pentecost to-day. 

"Flash from our eyes the glow of our thanksgiving, 
Glad and regretful, confident and calm. 

Then through all life and what is after living, 
Thrill to the tireless music of a psalm. 

"Yea, through life, through death, through sorrow and 
through sinning, 

He shall suffice me, for he hath sufficed ; 
Christ is the end for Christ was the beginning, 

Christ the beginning, for the end is Christ. ' 



Deacidified using the Bookkeeper process. 
Neutralizing agent: Magnesium Oxide 
Treatment Date: Nov. 2005 

PreservationTechnologies 

A WORLD LEADER IN PAPER PRESERVATION 
111 Thomson Park Drive 
Cranberry Township, PA 16066 
{724)779-2111 



